Washington Locks ICC Judges Out of Banks to Kill War Crime Probes

On February 6, 2025, the White House issued Executive Order 14203. It didn't just criticize the ICC—it lumped its officials in with terrorists and drug traffickers. The real power here isn't a courtroom; it's the U.S. dollar. By placing these individuals on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, the U.S. triggers a wave of 'over-compliance' from global banks. Since almost every major international transaction eventually clears through a U.S. intermediary, banks in places like Canada or Peru often kill accounts proactively to stay out of the Department of Justice’s crosshairs. For Judge Kimberly Prost and her colleagues, losing access to credit cards and digital IDs isn't a side effect. It’s the point. The policy is designed to make investigating U.S. interests too expensive to manage.

This all stems from a long-running fight over the 1998 Rome Statute. The U.S. never ratified it, so Washington’s stance is that the ICC has zero authority to prosecute American citizens. They’ve extended that same protection to Israel. But the real trigger for this latest move was the ICC’s interest in accountability for actions in Afghanistan and Gaza. By calling the court’s work 'illegitimate and baseless,' the White House isn't just defending individuals. It's asserting that the U.S. financial system is the ultimate boss of international law. If you don't play by their rules, you don't get to use their money. Simple as that.

“These are coercive measures designed to attack our ability to do our jobs objectively and independently.”

The tech sector’s reaction shows just how deep this goes. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Uber have already started nuking the accounts of sanctioned judges. It’s not necessarily that they agree with the policy—it’s about self-preservation. Providing 'services' to a sanctioned person can land a company officer in prison and lead to massive civil penalties. It’s a state of digital exile. It is an incredible level of economic pressure, far exceeding the symbolic criminal trials recently launched by Russia. Russia simply lacks the global infrastructure to make their threats stick; the U.S. doesn't.

The real winners here are the military and intelligence contractors operating in high-risk zones. By dismantling the court’s functional capacity, the administration has basically handed out a massive security blanket against future litigation. While 79 countries have signed a joint letter supporting the court, talk is cheap. None of them have offered a real financial alternative to the U.S.-dominated SWIFT system that would let these judges get their independence back. So far, we haven't seen any U.S. banks try to challenge these designations in court, either.

The big question is whether the ICC can even keep its current investigations going if its top staff can't participate in the global financial system. For the rest of us, this is a stark reminder of just how far U.S. executive power reaches. One signature in D.C. can vanish a bank account in The Hague or a cloud drive in Peru. As the court tries to navigate this blockade, the precedent is clear: international law only functions as long as the world's primary clearinghouse allows it to.