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 Ms 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 Ms Albanese and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Despite UN insistence that she had diplomatic immunity, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Ms 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.

Mr Trump’s strike at Ms 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.

Ms 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,” Ms 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 Ms 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 Ms Albanese and the ICC.

The plan to punish them was hatched in November 2024, when Mr Trump was re-elected and the ICC indicted his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While some career US diplomats urged restraint, senior Trump appointees pressed for tougher measures to cripple the ICC and punish Ms Albanese. In addition to Ms Albanese, the Trump administration sanctioned eight ICC judges and three prosecutors in 2025, in a blow to international judicial and human rights bodies.

The targeting of the ICC and Ms Albanese is part of Mr Trump’s hardball tactics in foreign policy.

In recent months, he has

captured

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.

Mr Trump’s clash with Ms 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 Mr Trump or US business interests.

Mr Trump’s opposition to international organisations 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 US$2.1 billion (S$2.67 billion) in mandatory dues to the UN, and secretary-general Antonio Guterres warned in a Jan 28 letter to member nations seen by Reuters that the

global body is at risk of “imminent financial collapse”

.

Mr Trump is now going further: He recently launched a

so-called Board of Peace

that – with himself as leader – aims to solve global conflicts, challenging the UN’s traditional role as the world’s diplomatic epicentre.

At least 20 countries have joined, none of them – apart from the US – major Western powers.

The consequences for Ms Albanese and senior ICC figures were swift. Their bank accounts were closed and credit cards cancelled.

Ms Albanese told Reuters she has had to borrow cards from friends to travel. After she received threats, the UN tightened security for her and her family. Her children, 12 and 9, no longer roam their neighbourhood in Tunisia, where the family lives.

“They cannot just run out of the house as they used to and go play,” Ms Albanese said.

Ms Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, said the sanctions set a dangerous precedent.

“It’s shocking that someone’s human rights work could be seen as so dangerous that they would be thought of as akin to a terrorist,” said Ms Satterthwaite, a New York University law professor.

The White House declined to comment. But a senior US official said Mr Trump is concerned that the ICC could one day seek to prosecute him or senior members of his administration, Reuters reported in December 2025.

The official said the administration would impose additional sanctions if the court did not amend its founding statute to explicitly bar investigations targeting Mr Trump or his top aides.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the US rejects “an outdated model of multilateralism” and will no longer participate in or fund international organisations that it deemed contrary to US national interests.

He said the sanctions against the ICC showed that the US “will not tolerate efforts to violate our sovereignty or to wrongfully subject US or Israeli persons to the ICC’s unjust jurisdiction”.

Mr Trump’s push against the court could weaken one of the few bodies that can hold powerful leaders – including Americans – to account. Some lawyers and diplomats say the US raid in Venezuela and lethal strikes on purported drug traffickers in the Caribbean may violate international law.

Mr Pigott called those actions a legal and “targeted law-enforcement operation”.

International law professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia, Dr Nancy Combs said: “US sanctions against the ICC are clearly an effort to really kneecap an institution that the Trump administration has always been opposed to.

“It’s a component of the Trump administration’s much larger worldview that Americans benefit when not constrained by a bunch of namby-pamby international norms.”

The ICC has condemned the US sanctions and vowed “to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world”.

In its November 2024 arrest warrants, the ICC accused Mr Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using what it called “starvation as a method of warfare”.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians since Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct 7, 2023.

Mr Netanyahu denounced the ICC warrants as “anti-Semitic” and a “dark day” for humanity, while Mr Gallant said the attempt to deny Israel’s right to wage a “just war” would fail.

At the same time, the ICC issued a warrant for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif for murder, torture, rape, hostage-taking and other crimes.

The ICC later dropped the warrant after Hamas confirmed that Mr Deif was dead, killed in a July 2024 air strike by Israel.

In December 2025, the

US imposed sanctions on two more ICC judges

.

The court has other problems, too. It was shaken by a scandal involving its chief prosecutor, Mr Karim Khan, the first ICC official to be sanctioned in 2025. He went on leave in May 2025 amid a

UN investigation into sexual misconduct allegations

, which he denies.

Speaking to Reuters from his home in The Hague, Mr Khan said judges, prosecutors and other officials were “soft targets for a big state with all that power”.

US tug of war

The Trump administration’s hostility towards the ICC and the UN is part of a broader retreat from international human rights diplomacy and institutions.

US foreign aid has been slashed, including grants for rights defenders. Washington has also withdrawn from or sharply cut funding for dozens of UN programmes, including the Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization and the World Food Program.

The ICC was set up in 2002 through an international treaty and is backed by 125 countries – but not the US, China, Israel and others. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have rejected its authority to scrutinise the US or its allies.

The first moves by Mr Trump against the ICC came in February 2025, when he issued his executive order authorising sanctions against the court, starting with its chief prosecutor, Mr Khan.

According to interviews with eight officials involved in the process, senior State Department officials deliberated over how far to expand penalties on the ICC and whether a UN mandate holder such as Ms Albanese could be sanctioned.

Trump political appointees and career diplomats often disagreed over strategies.

At a meeting in March, State Department officials weighed further ICC sanctions, with some advocating diplomatic pressure and limited penalties on lower-level staff to nudge the court to drop the Gaza and Afghanistan probes, according to an attendee and another person familiar with the meeting.

Mr David Milstein, senior adviser to Mr Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, accused the officials of slow-walking Mr Trump’s order, said the attendee.

Mr Milstein is a long-time opponent of the ICC. In 2021, he called it “a broken, corrupt political institution”, in part for “going after Israel unjustly”.

In the meeting, Mr Milstein urged the administration to sanction the entire court, regardless of any blowback the US might get from European allies, the attendee said.

Contacted via the State Department, Mr Milstein and Mr Huckabee declined to comment.

As a UN special rapporteur, Ms Albanese had no formal connection to the ICC. But her high-profile work on Gaza and support for the court made her another prominent target for Trump officials.

Instantly recognisable by her thick, horn-rimmed glasses, Ms Albanese is a global icon for many Palestinians and their supporters. An interview with Reuters at a cafe in Modena was repeatedly interrupted by passers-by, who hugged her or shook her hand and thanked her for highlighting Gaza’s plight.

“US sanctions have prompted a solidarity towards me wherever I go,” said Ms Albanese, 48.

Later, a line of people stretched around the block from the Modena venue where she was due to speak.

Ms Albanese is admired by many human rights advocates and loathed by Israel’s supporters.

She was criticised by Biden administration officials in 2024 for what they called anti-Semitic remarks after she commented on a post on social media platform X that compared a 1933 photo of Adolf Hitler with his admirers with an image of Mr Netanyahu welcomed by US lawmakers.

Beneath the post, Ms Albanese wrote: “This is precisely what I was thinking today.”

She later defended her comment, writing on X that “the Memory of the Holocaust remains intact and sacred” and “selective moral outrage” would not stop the course of justice.

“My comment has been misrepresented,” she told Reuters.

Appointed in 2022, Ms Albanese is one of more than 80 independent human rights experts mandated by the UN to investigate issues such as torture or freedom of expression, or to monitor particular countries.

They are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council for a minimum of six years. They are unpaid – Ms Albanese earns money from the books she has written – and do not represent their governments.

While there is no formal relationship between these experts and the ICC, they can submit their fact-finding reports to the court, meet its officials and use their influence at other global institutions and forums. Their UN status gives them diplomatic immunity – vital for doing a job that often makes them the target of powerful people, said three past and present UN-mandated experts.

“If you get rid of diplomatic immunity, you get rid of a fundamental principle of how the international system works,” said Dr Agnes Callamard, a former UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions who now leads human rights group Amnesty International.

Diplomatic immunity was a key issue that US officials debated internally as they considered sanctions against Ms Albanese, according to two people familiar with the matter.

On April 2, 2025, Ms Dorothy Shea, acting US representative to the UN, wrote to secretary-general Antonio Guterres to ask about Ms Albanese’s official job status within the UN, according to Ms Shea’s account in a subsequent letter to the UN chief.

A spokesman for Mr Guterres, Mr Stephane Dujarric, declined to comment on Mr Guterres’ reply.

But in an e-mail, Mr Dujarric said the secretary-general has made clear to the US government that “Albanese, in relation to her functions as special rapporteur, has legal status and immunity”.

Reuters has not seen the written exchange between the US and UN, and Ms Albanese said she was unaware of it. Ms Shea declined to comment.

It was around this time that Ms Albanese sent the letters marked “confidential” to US companies and charities. She warned they could be named in a report she planned to present to the UN’s Human Rights Council for “contributing to gross violations of human rights” by indirectly supporting Israel’s military operation in Gaza, according to a copy of letters reviewed by Reuters.

Among them were major US companies, including Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Alphabet, Amazon, Chevron, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Palantir.

A Palantir spokesperson said the company gave Ms Albanese evidence to show her claims were “categorically false”, which she “chose to entirely disregard”.

Ms Albanese told Reuters that, in its reply to her, Palantir had challenged none of the facts that ended up in her report.

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard declined to comment; the other companies did not reply to requests for comment.

In some letters, Ms Albanese accused the firms of aiding Israeli military operations in Gaza, urged them to cut ties with Israel, and warned executives they could be violating international law.

At least two US firms that received Ms Albanese’s letters sought help from the Trump administration, three of the US officials said. The companies complained about Ms Albanese’s letters to the National Energy Dominance Council, a new White House office Mr Trump created to promote and implement his energy policy, one of the officials said.

Reuters was unable to identify the two companies. The energy council did not respond to a request for comment made through the White House.

On June 20, 2025, Ms Shea wrote again to Mr Guterres, saying the US had seen Ms Albanese’s draft report and it was “riddled with inflammatory rhetoric and false accusations”.

Ms Albanese made “fundamental legal errors”, the US ambassador wrote, and called into question “any alleged privileges and immunities” she had as a UN expert.

The UN disagreed.

“The UN’s position, communicated directly to the State Department and often stated publicly, was that Ms Albanese, in relation to her functions as Special Rapporteur, has legal status and immunity as an expert on mission for the United Nations,” Mr Dujarric, Mr Guterres’s spokesman, told Reuters.

Ms Albanese told Reuters: “It is clear that my diplomatic immunity has not been respected.

“Responsibility for this does not lie with the United Nations, but with Member States’ failure to act decisively – particularly my own country, Italy, which has remained completely silent on this matter.”

State Department spokesman Mr Pigott said US correspondence with the UN “concerned calls for Ms Albanese to be removed from her position” and did not discuss whether she had diplomatic immunity.

The Italian government did not respond to a request for comment.

On July 1, 2025, the

UN released Ms Albanese’s report

accusing major US companies of complicity in what she called Israel’s “ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza”.

Among the crimes and violations the companies had enabled in the occupied Palestinian territories, she alleged, were genocide, forced displacement and starvation. Companies and their executives could be held criminally liable, including before the ICC, she wrote.

In response, the US publicly urged Mr Guterres to remove Ms Albanese and warned that failure to do so would necessitate “significant actions” by Washington.

Eight days later,

on July 9, 2025, the US sanctioned her

, citing Mr Trump’s executive order against the ICC.

‘Outraged’

The impact on Ms Albanese was immediate.

Just days after the sanctions were imposed, a Reuters reporter spotted her in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where she was orbited by two bodyguards. While no guards were apparent in Modena, Ms Albanese said she had received “some physical threats” since sanctions had been imposed, leading to a tightening of her security. She declined to detail the threats.

She and her Italian husband, Mr Massimiliano Cali, an economist for the World Bank, have lived in Tunisia for more than four years. They spent three years in Washington, where Mr Cali worked for the bank. Mr Cali and the World Bank declined to comment.

US sanctions have deprived Ms Albanese of basic financial services that most people take for granted. The US bank account she had is now closed, and sanctions have prevented her from opening one in another country, including Italy, she said.

Her US assets are frozen. That includes a condo in Washington valued at about US$700,000, that Ms Albanese and Mr Cali own. Under US law, the property cannot be sold or rented while frozen.

US sanctions are powerful: they not only freeze assets in the US, but also effectively cut off individuals from the US financial system – a global network that can block access to banking in most countries.

US citizens, corporations and foreigners legally residing in the US face steep fines or prison sentences for funding or aiding sanctioned individuals. European banks can be barred from operating in US dollars or excluded from international payment systems, devastating their business.

Ms Albanese told Reuters she had “received offers to open bank accounts in so-called fiscal or tax havens”, but declined, saying that would conflict with her ethical principles and would not resolve “the illegality of the US sanctions against me”.

During a Hanukkah celebration hosted by the Israeli mission to the UN in December 2025, US Ambassador Mike Waltz expressed little sympathy for Ms Albanese, according to a video of the event reviewed by Reuters.

“I’m glad she can’t get a credit card and I’m glad she can’t get a visa to come to the United States,” he said.

“We’re taking real action to impose consequences on those who are perpetuating their anti-Semitic actions.”

Mr Waltz’s spokesman declined to comment further.

The US Treasury Department, which enforces sanctions, makes exceptions for medical and other emergencies.

In December 2025, it approved a request by the Arizona-based Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for Ms Albanese to appear virtually at a conference.

Mr George Wang, a lawyer for MESA, said it sought US government clearance because it feared the talk might violate the sanctions. A Treasury spokesman said it does not comment on individual cases.

‘Resolved to carry on’

On August 20, 2025, six weeks after Ms Albanese was sanctioned, the US targeted more ICC staff – two judges and two prosecutors.

One of them was Canadian judge Kimberly Prost.

The State Department said she was sanctioned “for ruling to authorise the ICC’s investigation into US personnel in Afghanistan”, a decision she made in 2020.

But the next year, the ICC announced that it would focus on crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and an Islamic State group, and would “deprioritise other aspects” of the probe – including allegations of torture by US forces.

Ms Prost says there is currently “no active investigation to my knowledge” of US conduct in Afghanistan.

“I was somewhat surprised that I would be sanctioned for something I had done five years ago,” she told Reuters, “particularly because sanctions are not about punishment, they’re about changing your conduct, deterring you. And of course, none of that applies to me”, since the investigation of US forces is dormant.

After a lifetime spent in criminal justice, Ms Prost said, being included on a list of people implicated in terrorism and other grave crimes was “really psychologically difficult to accept”.

The court’s work is suffering.

Sanctions pose a “huge problem” for the ICC’s investigations into the Russia-Ukraine war, said Ms Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, a nonprofit that won a Nobel Peace Prize for documenting rights abuses.

The ICC is looking at Russia’s deportations of Ukrainian children and attacks on civilian infrastructure, said Ms Matviichuk, but its “limited court capacity” due to US sanctions has delayed what she expected to be a new line of inquiry into allegations of abuse of Ukrainians in Russian-run prisons.

In September 2025, Mr Trump’s ICC order was used again, this time to sanction three Palestinian human rights groups that were providing the court with evidence of alleged Israeli abuses.

Mr Shawan Jabarin, director of Al-Haq, one of the groups, said the measures halted payments to 45 staff. The ICC order also forced Al-Haq’s American lawyer, former war crimes prosecutor Katherine Gallagher, to drop out.

Ms Albanese remains outspoken.

“Palestine will be free,” she told a cheering crowd in an appearance at Together For Palestine, a star-studded fund-raising concert in London in September 2025. “Giving up is not a choice. We don’t have that luxury.”

She is still on the job. In October 2025, barred from entering the US, she addressed the UN General Assembly in New York remotely from South Africa.

“I will not stop doing what I’m doing,” she told Reuters. “No way.” REUTERS