Three International Criminal Court judges filed suit in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, challenging the Trump administration's sanctions against them — measures that revoked their U.S. visas, froze their assets, and barred them from U.S. financial transactions.

The plaintiffs are Kimberly Prost of Canada, Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, and Reine Adélaïde Alapini-Gansou of Benin. Their lawsuit, reported by Reuters on June 24, 2026, argues that the sanctions were imposed to punish and coerce ICC judicial decisions relating to the United States and Israel. The Open Society Justice Initiative confirmed the filings and identified each judge's nationality.

The sanctions stem from a February 2025 presidential action. The White House order framed the ICC's conduct toward Israel and the United States as a dangerous precedent and justified designating ICC personnel accordingly. By August 2025, the ICC Presidency formally documented the scope of those measures in an internal record (ICC-02/18), noting that they encompassed visa revocations, asset freezes, and prohibitions on U.S.-based financial transactions for affected judges.

The Judicial Record at Issue

Prost and Bossa are not random targets. Both joined the 2020 appeals chamber ruling that authorized the ICC prosecutor to open a formal investigation — a decision the United States had opposed. Prost herself has a long history with the ICC at The Hague; before her election to the bench, she served as Chef de Cabinet to the ICC President. Alapini-Gansou is a senior jurist from Benin with extensive human rights experience on the continent.

The judges' core legal argument is straightforward: using sanctions to punish prior judicial decisions and to pressure future ones violates U.S. law, according to Al Jazeera. The claim is not a broad attack on executive sanction power but rather a narrower one — that applying sanctions in retaliation for judges performing their duties crosses a legal boundary. The choice of a Manhattan federal court matters. It places the case before U.S. Article III judges (federal judges bound by the Constitution) who will weigh executive national-security authority against claims rooted in due process and the separation between legitimate pressure and punitive targeting of individuals for their judicial acts.

What Comes Next

This suit occupies genuinely contested legal ground. The executive branch's sanctions power under statutes like IEEPA—the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—is expansive, and courts have historically deferred to foreign-policy rationales. But the judges sidestep attacking the foreign-policy judgment itself; they attack the punitive, retaliatory mechanism. Whether that distinction survives legal scrutiny will be the central doctrinal question.

There is also the practical reality. An ICC judge with frozen assets and no valid visa faces genuine professional and personal disruption—the sanctions are not merely symbolic. If the court denies any preliminary relief, the judges will continue functioning under these conditions while litigation stretches on for years. If relief is granted, it means a U.S. federal court has restrained the sitting executive's sanctions regime — an institutional moment regardless of one's position on the underlying ICC cases.

The broader context here deserves attention. Sanctions directed at judicial officers of an international tribunal are a relatively new tool. Other governments and international bodies are watching closely how the Manhattan court handles foundational questions—standing, justiciability, the scope of the act-of-state doctrine—and not just the case's merits. The outcome will carry weight well beyond these three judges.