NEWS
Fifteen Years for a Warrant
27 July 2026 — Russia / United States / International Criminal Court
Context
On 12 December 2025 a Moscow court convicted the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, in absentia, sentencing him to fifteen years in prison. Alongside him, eight judges and former officials of the Court — including former president Piotr Hofmanski — received sentences ranging from three and a half to fifteen years. All were declared internationally wanted. Eleven months earlier, another power that never signed the Rome Statute had chosen a different instrument to strike exactly the same officials, for exactly the same reason: an arrest warrant against a head of state or a close ally.
The Russian conviction
The most serious charge against Khan and the judges equates the lawful prosecution of a head of state with "an attack on a representative of a foreign state aimed at provoking war" — treating the Court's own conduct as an act of war. The conviction comes almost three years after the ICC, on 17 March 2023, issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, held responsible for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia from occupied territories. On 4 February 2026, UN Special Rapporteurs called the Russian convictions "null and devoid of legal effect," warning of the risk that using domestic jurisdictions against the Court could become a reproducible precedent for other states.
The American sanctions
On 6 February 2025 Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14203, imposing sanctions on ICC officials, with Khan as the first target: asset freezes, a ban on entry to the United States, restrictions on financial services. Three subsequent rounds — in June, August and December 2025 — extended the sanctions to eight judges and to deputy prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang, also hitting officials who had worked on the investigation into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. The stated reason: the warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The symmetry test
Two different instruments — a criminal conviction in absentia, economic sanctions — applied by the same two countries that, not by coincidence, never ratified the Rome Statute, against the same officials, for the same reason. The test holds in both directions: had Moscow imposed sanctions and Washington handed down a criminal conviction, the judgment would not change. Striking at the independence of international justice to protect one's own head of state or a close ally remains the same conduct, whichever flag it flies under. A search for a third comparable case — China, the only other permanent Security Council power that never ratified the Rome Statute — produced no equivalent case: the only public reaction found is a diplomatic call for "prudence" after the arrest of former Philippine president Duterte in March 2025, not a punitive action, and the Court has never issued a warrant against China's own leadership. That gap should be stated as such, not forced shut.
Legal comment
The real problem is not that two great powers reacted harshly to warrants that touched them directly. It is that the Court has no coercive instrument of its own: it depends on state cooperation for every arrest, every asset seizure, every enforcement of a judgment. A state that criminally convicts its own judges and one that freezes their bank accounts are, by different means, making the same demonstration: that international justice remains a blunt weapon when it meets someone with the power to ignore it. This is not an occasional enforcement gap — it is the structural absence of a police force behind the Rome Statute, the same gap already flagged in relation to the warrant against Netanyahu.
Sources: OHCHR, Special Rapporteurs (4 February 2026) · The Moscow Times (12 December 2025) · Zona.Media (12 December 2025) · The White House, Executive Order 14203 (6 February 2025) · The Times of Israel (18 December 2025) · Inquirer.net (13 March 2025)