WASHINGTON — Two human rights organizations are taking the Trump administration to court, arguing that sanctions placed on the International Criminal Court over its investigations into Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza have unlawfully restricted their ability to speak out on behalf of Palestinians.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, the groups say they have been compelled to pull back on their own advocacy efforts out of fear of White House retaliation. An executive order issued last year not only took aim at the Hague-based court but also barred Americans from providing or receiving services to or from any sanctioned entities.
The two organizations — DAWN and Taxpayers Alliance Against Genocide — are suing top administration officials and asking the court to strike down the restrictions that have limited their advocacy and their ability to work alongside Palestinian human rights groups and other parties that have been sanctioned.
“The Trump administration is using the blunt instrument of economic sanctions not only to punish human rights defenders but to police the political expressions of millions of Americans,” said Omar Shakir, the executive director of DAWN, a U.S.-based group that promotes democracy and human rights in the Arab world. DAWN was founded by Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in 2018.
“The government is violating the constitutional rights of American citizens in order to shield officials of a foreign government who have committed a genocide,” Shakir added in a statement.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
The ICC has been examining allegations of war crimes in Gaza stemming from the conflict that erupted after Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. In 2024, a panel of judges issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Netanyahu has dismissed the warrants as “absurd.”
Neither the United States nor Israel is a member of the court, and both countries reject its authority over them.
Following the issuance of those warrants, President Donald Trump signed an executive order accusing the ICC of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” and warning of “tangible and significant consequences” for those behind the court’s “transgressions.”
Over the past year, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Palestinian human rights organizations, several ICC judges and staff members — including the court’s former chief prosecutor — and Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza. Albanese’s family filed their own lawsuit in February, claiming the sanctions violated First Amendment protections.
According to the new lawsuit, DAWN has already stopped submitting materials to the ICC regarding Israel’s conduct during the war, ceased sharing evidence and legal analysis with sanctioned non-governmental organizations, and ended collaboration with those groups on advocacy efforts. The organization has also been forced to “discontinue its professional engagements” with Albanese.
“The chilling effect on Plaintiffs has been profound,” the lawsuit states. “They now face prison terms and ruinous fines if, in their interactions with the designated parties, they provide or receive anything that Defendants could plausibly characterize as a ‘service’ — an extraordinarily capacious term that potentially reaches any act that confers a benefit on its recipient. Fearing liability, Plaintiffs — and countless others like them — have turned to self-censorship.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the named defendants in the case, has continued to speak out forcefully against the court. In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, he pledged that the administration would “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary,” warning that the court’s “overreach” could eventually bring U.S. Border Patrol agents, federal prosecutors, and Marines under the tribunal’s jurisdiction.
“The ICC’s interfering with American military and law enforcement operations isn’t only a grave overreach of its purported authorities. It would mean the death of the U.S. as a sovereign and independent nation,” Rubio wrote. “Our decision and our people would be at the mercy of the ICC and its collaborators in the ‘international community.’ To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.”
The State Department indicated the administration’s campaign against the court could involve additional sanctions, visa revocations, travel bans targeting ICC employees, and heightened scrutiny of countries that do not reject the court’s authority.
