Akane and Seye on the list, Chad and Venezuela outside the treaty
The United States has designated the president of the International Criminal Court, Tomoko Akane of Japan, and the court's senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the two had directly engaged in efforts by the court to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to its jurisdiction, and called the court corrupt and fatally politicised. The measures close the United States to both names and cut them out of the US financial system. The court answered that the sanctions undermine the rule of law, and that when judicial actors are threatened for applying the law the international legal order itself is placed at risk.[1]
The second lever is older and quieter. Last month Washington opened a wider diplomatic offensive, accusing the court of threatening Americans and calling on partners to withdraw from it. Chad and Venezuela have announced that they are leaving, and the court has said such steps risk undermining the collective pursuit of justice. The court was established in 2002. The United States signed the Rome Statute that created it and never ratified the treaty; Israel and Russia are not members either.[1]
Which of the two changes what the court can do?
The two instruments reach different things. A designation reaches an officeholder: it closes a border and shuts off a financial system for the person named, and the court says that threatening judicial actors for applying the law endangers the legal order. An office, though, has a successor. A withdrawal removes a state from the treaty that created the court, and about Chad and Venezuela the court spoke of a risk to the collective pursuit of justice. On what has been published, the second instrument is the one that changes who is left. A reading that runs the other way is available: if the designations are aimed less at Akane and Seye themselves than at everyone who would transact with the people the court employs, pressure on the staff reaches the institution as well.[1]
On 25 July this column read a vote of 144 against 10 as proof that a multilateral institution can absorb great-power opposition through coalition arithmetic, and wrote that the outcome conferred legitimacy while withholding the leverage to compel practice (144 against 10, and the durability of an institution). The International Criminal Court case weakens the first half of that reading. The opposing state has stopped contesting the outcome inside the institution and has begun to work on who belongs to it; with Chad and Venezuela leaving, the arithmetic that was supposed to do the absorbing is itself being subtracted from.[1], [2]
What would show whether the membership has moved?
A measurable test is available. If Washington keeps up the offensive it opened last month, then by 31 October 2026 either another state announces that it is leaving the Rome Statute, or the list of departures stays at Chad and Venezuela. The first outcome would show the campaign moving the membership; the second would show the arithmetic holding under pressure it has already absorbed twice. Until one of them appears, the designations of Akane and Seye describe what Washington is willing to spend, and say little about what the court can still do.[1]