If you listen carefully, you might be able to hear the applause of wanted war criminals, despots, and dictators around the world.

The passing of a bill imposing sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the United States’ House of Representatives should be of concern to all countries that believe in a rules-based order. The sanctions pose a significant, perhaps even existential, threat to the world’s only permanent tribunal capable of prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Will states stand up to support the very Court they created?

While they do not come as a surprise, America’s sanctions against the ICC will come into effect in the coming weeks. The purported reason for these coercive measures is that the Court has defied the interests of the United States, especially by investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli forces in Palestine as well as the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

But this is not the first time that Washington has sanctioned the ICC; it did so towards the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, in 2020. Indeed, the latest sanctions fit within a long-standing effort by Republican administrations to destroy the Court, beginning with the presidency of George W. Bush. What really seems to get their goat is that the ICC does not simply do America’s bidding. In that way, the incoming sanctions are something of a compliment: they indicate the independence and impartiality of the ICC, as well as its refusal to kowtow to narrow state interests that oppose accountability for mass atrocities.

The sanctions are aimed at the ICC as an institution, its staff and their family members, and those who provide material, financial, or technological support to the Court’s work in Palestine. Human rights advocates have rightly condemned the sanctions and the threats against the ICC’s independence and will continue to do so. But there is only so much they can do. The Court’s members states – including close allies of the United States – need to defend the ICC.

What does that look like? 

For one, it means states stating, unequivocally, that they oppose any attempt to threaten the ICC or to sanction its staff. States do not need to agree with everything the Court does to respect its independence and decision-making. What is necessary is for their support of the institution to be consistent. Every time a state endorses the ICC’s arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin yet condemns the warrant for Netanyahu is a hammer strike against the possibility of a consistent rules-based order.

The sanctions will likely result in pressures on financial bodies and banks as well as companies – airlines, telecommunications, etc. – that work with the Court. It is crucial that staff salaries and the resources needed to investigate and prosecute international crimes be insulated so that the lights can stay on, and atrocities can be addressed. Supporting the Court therefore also means finding concrete ways to keep the ICC operating on a day-to-day basis.

ICC member-states should likewise understand that it is their own citizens that are being threatened. The staff at the ICC – including senior prosecutors and investigators as well as one of the Court’s judges – come from dozens of countries, many of which are allies of America. States should therefore make clear that it is unacceptable that their citizens be targeted with sanctions for merely doing their job. They should explain that doing so is an aggressive bilateral and multilateral threat against them as states, and not just against the Court. Critically, they should do this in solidarity with each other rather than ensure that only the citizens and staff of Western states are made immune from sanction, leaving others to face the brunt of American coercion.

Will such state support emerge? It is likely to be a mixed bag. 

On the same day that the House passed the sanctions bill, Poland – an ICC member state with a long history of being subjected to atrocity crimes – announced that it would allow Netanyahu to visit the country without fear of arrest or surrender to the Court. This is in defiance of Poland’s legal obligations, and also in direct contradiction to Warsaw’s justified anger when Mongolia hosted Putin in September 2024.

States should do the exact opposite as Poland and clearly announce that any arrest warrants issued by the ICC will be enforced. Many already have. Others, like the Canadian government have said it will “abide” by the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. Whether “abide” means “enforce” has yet to be clarified.

The Trump administration has four years to try to throttle the ICC. By all indications, it plans to do just that, regardless of whether it is to the benefit of Russia’s Putin, former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, wanted for genocide in Darfur, or Myanmar’s military junta leader Min Aung Hlaing, who faces possible charges of crimes against humanity in relation to the persecution of the Rohingya people. They are surely thrilled that Washington is working to undermine the only institution capable of holding them to account for their crimes.

If the ICC is allowed to collapse, it won’t merely be due to American sanctions, but because the Court wasn’t adequately defended, insulated, and supported by its member-states. It is time for the ICC’s real supporters to please stand up.