The Assembly of States Parties (ASP), the legislative and executive organ of the International Criminal Court (ICC or Court), is scheduled to convene in New York in December this year for its annual backslapping fest. Established by the Rome Statute, as cobbled together at the 1998 Rome Conference, the self-styled international court is a treaty-based international organization ostensibly committed to prosecuting crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, and wars of aggression among its States Parties, the countries that are signed up to the Court, should they be disinclined, unwilling, or unable to do so themselves. The Court opened its doors in 2002, following the treaty’s ratification by 60 countries. The Assembly has historically met alternately in The Hague, the seat of the Court, and in New York, the seat of the United Nations.
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The Assembly brings together a truly motley crew consisting of politicians and diplomats representing States Parties to the Rome Statute. The most important of these countries will be those European vassal states of the European Union (EU), whose bloc vote is greatly enhanced by the fact that the EU essentially pays for the Court and is not averse to politically and economically blackmailing Global South member states wavering in their obedience to it. There will also be some observer states that have chosen not to sign up to the Court but are nevertheless curious about what the inmates will try to get up to next. Normally there would also be gaggles of Court employees, although they may be thinned out this year by some of the preliminary anti-ICC sanctions put into place by the Trump administration. If European bureaucrats, diplomats, and Court employees were not enough, they will ordinarily also be joined by bustlingly self-important non-governmental organizations, enthusiastic political activists, and fellow travelers brought together by the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, which trumpets its intimate relationship with the ICC and rigidly enforces DEI criteria throughout the Court. Picture hundreds of middle-class wannabe Robespierres and the equivalent of les tricoteuses, the harpies knitting beside the French Revolutionary guillotines—instead of knitting, their latter-day successors are furiously clicking away on their iPhones at dozens of side-events, proclaiming their presence and messages on social media—all with anti-American and anti-Israeli zealotry oozing out of every pore.
This Assembly bears clear legal, political, and moral responsibility for this deeply questionable, corrupted institution masquerading as an international court. Among other things, the Assembly will select a new batch of NGO-vetted “judges,” by way of corrupt vote-trading, to perpetuate this pseudo-court. The Assembly also intends to rubber-stamp the latest installment of funding for this $3 billion enterprise.
While the Assembly is the legal owner of ICC Inc., there is equally little doubt as to the International Criminal Court’s parentage. The Court is ultimately the test-tube baby of the European Union and self-styled “civil society,” which is to say, the unaccountable human rights industry and non-governmental organizations mentioned above. And if that provenance was not bad enough, the United Nations stands as the enthusiastic Godfather to the Court: The tradition of alternate Assembly sessions being held in New York is itself an homage to the ICC’s lodestar.
President Trump has twice declared by way of executive orders that the International Criminal Court “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and its allies. It is a very good call. The ICC represents an absolute threat to American values, security, government officials, and service personnel. And to be very clear, American opposition to the ICC must not be disingenuously misconstrued (as it nevertheless will be) as opposition to human rights or international justice, values that have been central to American foreign policy for decades and upon which Washington has led the way since 1945. Washington’s concerns that the international community was sold a false bill of goods during the 1998 negotiations in Rome were all too clearly well founded: Even President Clinton conceded the resultant Court was seriously flawed. American concerns were cogently and clearly articulated in some detail at the time by Senator Jesse Helms and others.
Those countries that hesitatingly or otherwise signed and ratified the Rome Statute establishing the Court were guaranteed that the treaty-based body had no Universalist aspirations to be the world court and would stay in its lane policing core international crimes should its signatory states be unwilling or unable to do so. Instead, the Court has deliberately jumped the legal reservation upon which it and its disingenuous enablers and supporters promised the United States and other skeptics it would stay put.
The drafters of the Rome Statute (many of whom are non-lawyers) admit that ambiguities, described as “delightfully ambiguous,” “constructive ambiguity,” “interpretive deviation,” and “opportunistic” constructions by pro-ICC legal scholars, were deliberately written into the Rome Statute. Other scholars simply point to “jurisdictional loopholes.” These voids have subsequently been exploited to shoehorn in “interpretations” of the Statute by activist ICC prosecutors and judges to pursue their plans for precisely the sort of hegemonic runaway court warned about by the United States and others from Day One. Even the pro-ICC Economist has admitted that “impressions that the judges and prosecutor were making the rules up as they went along were often accurate.” The alarm bells have been going off for quite some time, and the results were unsealed ICC indictments of Israeli leaders in 2024 (and as-yet-sealed indictments for others) despite the fact that Israel, like the U.S., purposefully never signed up to this “court.”
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The reality is that the Court is part and parcel of a concerted stealth campaign, alongside equally activist courts such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, to bypass and replace national sovereignty with a universal court—or, more accurately, an NGO—replacing democratic accountability with the rule of Woke NGO-vetted activist judges.
For the ICC, an entity designated to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States,” to be allowed to hold its command and control sessions in the United States would be a propaganda victory for this anti-American Court and its anti-American supporters and a finger in the eye of the Trump administration.
What is to be done, one may well ask? The answer is simple. Secretary of State Rubio has declared an all-of-government campaign against the Court: it just needs to be implemented. The Trump administration should ban any and all foreign Court employees, contractors, or other service providers of the Court from attending this anti-American gathering in New York. Any requests for a U.S. visa to do so should be denied, and any existing visas for that purpose withdrawn. This visa ban should be extended to any foreign nationals attending the Assembly on behalf of any nongovernmental organization. Every airline flying in non-U.S. ASP delegates should be warned about the consequences of so doing. Any venue for ASP meetings, every hotel hosting ICC or ASP delegates, or any commercial entity, NGO, or individual providing support services to the ASP and its delegates within the United States should be sanctioned. There should be penalties against non-U.S. persons, organizations, or humanitarian organizations providing material or operational support to the ASP and ICC. Washington should impose asset freezes and block access to the U.S. financial system for any and all financial transfers to the ICC.
It has been said that any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. The practices of the ICC are a lot less palatable. Given that the ICC has an established, well-documented, and publicly criticized track record of corruptly “electing” its judges by way of vote-trading, a practice University of California, Berkeley School of Law Professor Ofer Eldar notes is widely seen “as being a form of corruption, undue influence, and even coercion,” perhaps that is a good place to start. Should corruption and coercion in the course of aiding and abetting an organization declared to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” be tolerated on U.S. soil? Similarly, this is a Court that has a track record of grave prosecutorial misconduct, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. In addition, the Court has systematically violated several articles of the Rome Statute, the law it was sworn to uphold. For these reasons and several others, it might be useful to run a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act template past the Assembly of States Parties and the International Criminal Court, if only out of curiosity.
If those diplomats accredited to the United Nations wish to attend whatever is left of the ASP, then so be it. But any international façade should be removed once and for all.
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