Too often international agencies are established with seemingly noble purposes but end up descending into blatant politicization that mocks their original intent. An egregious example is the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established in 2002 to bring powerful perpetrators to justice for committing the world’s worst crimes with impunity. Instead, the court has become a case study in institutional overreach, politically selective enforcement and abuse.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Secretary of State Marco Rubio rightly called for dismantling the ICC, “brick by brick, if necessary.” He’s right. Even though the U.S. has never joined the ICC, the agency claims that through international laws that have never been enacted by the U.S. it has jurisdiction over U.S. private citizens and government officials, including members of our armed services and domestic police forces. That means it could bring Americans to face trial and imprison them. This threat is not theoretical. The ICC’s prosecutor threatened 12 U.S. Senators who criticized it.
The ICC’s pursuit of Israeli leaders is the clearest, ugliest example of its abandoning impartial justice for egregious, human-rights-violation politics. In late 2024, the court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the war in Gaza. The ICC’s warrants totally ignored the context of the war: Israel was responding to the barbarous October 7 attacks, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. Israel had a sovereign, moral right to defend itself and dismantle the Hamas military, a terrorist organization that deliberately conducted its attacks from among Gaza’s citizenry in a way to maximize innocent civilian casualties. Treating Israel’s military response and Hamas’ actions as morally equivalent—as the warrants effectively did—was a profound miscarriage of justice against a democracy fighting a defensive war under difficult urban conditions. No country in military history has carried out urban warfare with greater effort to minimize civilian losses than Israel has done in Gaza.
The episode confirmed that the ICC was willing to bend its legal standards under political pressure from member states hostile to Israel rather than to apply the law neutrally.
What makes this situation especially tawdry and ugly is that the ICC’s chief prosecutor, who hails from Britain, has been accused of sexual misconduct. There is the suspicion his behavior regarding the court has been motivated to divert attention from his personal scandal and gain political support from anti-Israeli and anti-American nations. He has recently been suspended from practicing law in the U.K.
The case against Israel isn’t an isolated incident. The ICC’s overwhelming historical focus on African nations has similarly drawn accusations of double standards, even as far more powerful states with worse records escape scrutiny because they simply refuse to join.
Given the biases of the ICC, Secretary of State Rubio is correct in going after it. The agency, in Rubio’s words, is indeed “waging a war against our country” through “so-called international law. The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists and hostile Third World governments.”
Case closed!