In Trump’s war on global justice, court staff and UN face terrorist-grade sanctions

MODENA, (Italy): Marked “confidential,” the letters went out to some of America’s most powerful companies in the spring of 2025.

Written by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine, the letters warned more than a dozen US firms and two charities that she might soon name them in a UN report for “contributing to gross violations of human rights” by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. Among her targets: Alphabet, Amazon, Caterpillar, Chevron, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft and Palantir.

Her letters so alarmed the US companies that at least two sought help from the White House, according to a Reuters investigation into the US campaign against Albanese and the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Despite UN insistence that she had diplomatic immunity, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Albanese for “writing threatening letters” to the companies and urging the ICC to investigate. The Reuters’ findings are based on interviews with more than two dozen US and UN officials, ICC staff and sanctioned individuals.

Trump’s strike at Albanese was part of a broader executive order he used to sanction ICC judges and prosecutors – a campaign intended in part to head off any future attempts to hold him or his officials accountable for US military action overseas, Reuters found.

Albanese and the sanctioned ICC staff now sit on the US Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, alongside suspected al Qaeda terrorists, Mexican drug traffickers and North Korean arms dealers. “This is unjust, unfair, and persecutorial,” Albanese said in an interview in Modena in her native Italy. “I’m being punished because of my human rights work.”

The Trump administration said it imposed sanctions on ICC staff for their “illegitimate and baseless” attempts to investigate alleged crimes by Israel’s leaders in Gaza and by US military personnel in Afghanistan. The US State Department said Albanese had encouraged the ICC to investigate American companies and executives after making “extreme and unfounded accusations” in her letters to them. “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare,” it said in a statement announcing the sanctions.

But Reuters found deep divisions within the US government over the scope and timing of the sanctions against Albanese and the ICC. The plan to punish them was hatched in November 2024, when Trump was re-elected and the ICC indicted his ally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. While some career US diplomats urged restraint, senior Trump appointees pressed for tougher measures to cripple the ICC and punish Albanese. In addition to Albanese, the Trump administration sanctioned eight ICC judges and three prosecutors last year, in a blow to international judicial and human rights bodies.

The targeting of the ICC and Albanese is part of Trump’s hardball tactics in foreign policy. In recent months, he has arrested Venezuela’s president and jailed him in New York, threatened to attack Iran for its bloody suppression of mass protests, and triggered a crisis within NATO by trying to muscle fellow member Denmark into handing over Greenland.

Trump’s clash with Albanese and the ICC provides a vivid portrait of the institutional and personal fallout of his widening assault on international bodies. Washington has long used sanctions to punish rogue states and deter human rights abusers. Targeting a UN-mandated expert and so many ICC staff – including eight of its 18 judges – marks a major break, eight experts on US sanctions said. Individuals and global institutions that once drew mere rebukes from the US now face efforts to hobble or dismantle them when deemed threats to Trump or US business interests.

Trump’s opposition to international organizations dates to his first term in office, when he withdrew from the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty, and slashed discretionary funding to some UN agencies. Today, the US owes more than $2.1 billion in mandatory dues to the U.N, and Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned in a January 28 letter to member nations seen by Reuters that the global body is at risk of “imminent financial collapse.”