U.S. places sanctions on international tribunal prosecutor

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and one of her top aides for continuing to investigate war crimes allegations against Americans. The sanctions were immediately denounced by the court, the United Nations and human rights advocates.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the moves as part of the administration’s pushback against the tribunal, based in The Hague, for investigations into the United States and its allies. The sanctions include a freeze on assets held in the U.S. or subject to U.S. law and target prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and the court’s head of jurisdiction, Phakiso Mochochoko.

He said the court, to which the United States has never been a party, was “a thoroughly broken and corrupt institution.”

“We will not tolerate its illegitimate attempts to subject Americans to its jurisdiction,” Pompeo told reporters at a State Department news conference. In addition to the sanctions imposed on Bensouda and Mochochoko, Pompeo said people who provide them with “material support” in investigating Americans could also face U.S. penalties.

Pompeo had previously imposed a travel ban on Bensouda and other tribunal employees over investigations into allegations of torture and other crimes by Americans in Afghanistan.

The Hague-based court and the head of its governing board decried the step as an assault on the rule of law and the international system set up by the Treaty of Rome that created the tribunal in 2002.

The sanctions “are another attempt to interfere with the court’s judicial and prosecutorial independence and crucial work to address grave crimes of concern to the international community,” the ICC said in a statement. “These coercive acts, directed at an international judicial institution and its civil servants, are unprecedented and constitute serious attacks.”

O-Gon Kwon, the president of the court’s Assembly of States Parties, called the move “unprecedented and unacceptable” and an affront to efforts to combat impunity for war crimes. “They only serve to weaken our common endeavor to fight impunity for mass atrocities,” he said.