Rubio takes aim at the ICC and the UN
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sharply criticized the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN on Friday in a speech to lawyers and law students, drawing loud applause and a standing ovation as he attacked what he deemed the “weaponization of international law.” Rubio said international law had been invoked against “nearly every major foreign policy decision or action” of the Trump administration, according to remarks he made at the National Lawyers Convention of the Federalist Society, a self-described conservative group.
He cited President Donald Trump’s order for the military to sink cartel boats in the Caribbean, saying Washington had been accused of violating international law with the strikes. Rubio added that the founding chief prosecutor of what he called the “fake and illegitimate International Criminal Court” had even accused the US of crimes against humanity, while similar accusations came from the UN when US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro this January and brought him to the US to face federal criminal charges.
International law called an instrument of the global elite
“For this global elite, international law is not a neutral body of rules,” Rubio said. “International law is an instrument, an instrument to advance their interest under the pretense of universal principles,” he added.
Rubio defended Trump’s “unprecedented decision to sanction the fake International Criminal Court,” describing it as an “unelected world tribunal” that claims authority over sovereign states, including those that have never accepted its jurisdiction. “Americans have never agreed to submit to the ICC’s authority, but that court and its allies in the global bureaucracy have appointed themselves judge and jury and executioner of the international order,” he said, adding: “They think they have the right to rule over everyone, but they are accountable to no one.”
Warning to the court in The Hague
Rubio cautioned the ICC against “quoting laws to men with swords,” accusing the Hague-based tribunal of trying to enforce rules that Washington does not recognize. He called the court accountable to no one although “armed with the power to investigate, to prosecute, to persecute and to jail our citizens, according to laws we neither consent nor control.”
“If they’re foolish enough to try to enforce their paper decrees on Americans, our answer will probably be the same as the Roman general Pompey when he said to those who were trying to invoke their city’s charters against his legions,” Rubio said. The words of Pompey, as he told it, were: “Stop quoting laws to men with swords.”
The top US diplomat also drew parallels with the US judicial system, accusing “activist courts” of seeking to “govern by injunction.” He argued that critics of the administration viewed “the fundamental purpose of the law, American law and international law alike,” as weakening the United States, and dismissed those arguments as having no foundation in American history. “There is nothing, there is nothing in our history, or the history of any other great nation, that requires us to recognize the authority or legitimacy of any of these ridiculous ideas,” he said.
Sanctions, the Rome Statute and the 2028 question
The remarks came around a month after the United States announced new sanctions on the ICC, vowing to cripple its operations. Rubio previously said Washington would bar transactions with what he called a “rogue court,” stepping up a long-running campaign by the Trump government against the tribunal, and Washington has vowed to dismantle it, angered as judges issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged crimes in Gaza.
The court prosecutes individuals accused of the gravest atrocities and acts as a last resort when countries do not have adequate legal systems to ensure accountability. The US signed the Rome Statute establishing the ICC but never ratified the treaty, and Israel, Russia and China are also not ICC members.
Rubio’s keynote address marks his first major US speech since the Republican Party’s sweeping losses in midterm elections earlier this month. The venue, a gathering of the legal profession, could further speculation that he is looking beyond his foreign policy portfolio, and he is widely seen as a possible successor to Trump, although he has dismissed reports that he was planning to leave the administration to prepare for a 2028 election run.