ICC judge on what U.S. sanctions mean for her and global courts
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
An ICC judge describes how U.S. sanctions disrupted her banking, insurance, and tech services.
Canadian ICC judge Kimberly Prost, sanctioned under a Trump executive order targeting officials involved in cases related to Israel/Gaza or Afghanistan, says the sanctions have disrupted her daily life. Her credit cards were canceled and AXA, the French insurer for the court, refuses to pay claims. She also lost access to Amazon, Google, and other services. The sanctions stem from her 2020 vote on the Appeals Chamber to authorize an investigation into alleged crimes in Afghanistan, which included "a small component related to the United States." By August 2026, nine of the court's 18 judges were sanctioned. Prost is challenging the sanctions in U.S. federal court, but continues hearing a case on alleged crimes in Timbuktu, Mali.
She says the sanctions are intended to pressure judges to decide cases according to U.S. government wishes rather than the law, calling the measures "completely futile."
What commenters are saying
Commenters largely agree the sanctions undermine U.S. soft power and global legitimacy, with many seeing them as a "petty tantrum" that exposes the fiction of American neutrality in international law. A central tension emerges: while several argue the EU could counter sanctions via blocking statutes (as China does), others note that banks and companies overcomply because they depend on U.S. financial infrastructure. Some defend the ICC's rationale as a check on impunity for national-scale criminals, while others criticize it as a vehicle for international political interests. One commenter warns the result could be commerce moving to black markets and cryptocurrencies, fragmenting global trade into competing blocs.