As countries around the world convene for the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expanding an effort to protect the United States from scrutiny by international organizations for alleged violations of international or humanitarian law. 

In recent weeks, the State Department withdrew from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council and has escalated its push to dismantle the International Criminal Court, or ICC.

The U.S. moves come after experts commissioned by the U.N.’s top human rights body determined the U.S. had committed war crimes during the Iran war and as the ICC continues to pursue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.

In August, Rubio announced the U.S. was imposing sanctions on ICC President Tomoko Akane, who is from Japan, and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, who is from Senegal.

In a July op-ed announcing the U.S. push to dismantle the court, Rubio described those sanctions as part of a campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick.”

Senior U.S. officials placed calls to countries urging them to withdraw from the ICC and reject its authority to prosecute Americans, including putting diplomatic pressure on nations that “enjoy the benefits of the U.S. security umbrella” and rely on U.S. assistance. The U.S. has promised increased scrutiny of countries that refuse to do so.

“At first, it was marketed as a narrow backstop to prosecute the gravest crimes,” Rubio wrote. “Now the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states—and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”

The ICC is a last resort to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity when countries are unwilling or unable to hold individuals responsible within their own territory.

Rubio cited multiple actions by the current Trump administration facing international scrutiny: deportations to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, boat strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and deadly attacks on civilians during the Iran war.

Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA’s national director of government relations, said Rubio’s examples “show the cards of the administration.”

“This isn’t really about sovereignty and protecting sovereignty,” Klasing told MS NOW. “It’s about trying to evade accountability for actions that they are taking.”

President Donald Trump has dismissed the idea that Rubio is protecting him from the ICC.

“There’s no information that they’re after ⁠me,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting in July, adding that Rubio “is not trying to defend me. He is trying to defend Bibi [Netanyahu] and various other people.”

Though the U.S. is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that gave the ICC its jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the ICC asserts authority over actions committed within or against its 125 member states, a claim long disputed by American presidents from both parties.

But when Rubio served in the U.S. Senate, he urged the ICC to investigate after Russia, another nonmember, invaded Ukraine.

Rubio co-sponsored a resolution to bring war crimes complaints against Russian President Vladimir Putin to the ICC and urge the court to expand its investigation to include Russian military leaders carrying out war crimes.

Trump’s disdain for the ICC began in his first term and has only deepened as the court has gone after Israeli officials in recent years. 

In 2020, the ICC launched an investigation into war crimes committed in Afghanistan, including by American forces and CIA officers. That investigation is continuing and has so far issued warrants for the arrest of two senior Taliban leaders.

While the ICC has never charged a U.S. leader, in 2024 it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu related to war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza — a move criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Since the U.S. began its pressure campaign, only two countries — Venezuela and Chad — have left the ICC, joining Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, who left earlier this year.

Though the ICC is a separate body, the U.N. has consistently reaffirmed its importance.

“It remains for us a critical cog in the international justice system,” U.N. Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric recently said of the ICC amid U.S. efforts to undermine it.

The U.S. is pushing back against international scrutiny in other ways as well.

On the eve of the U.N. General Assembly, the U.S. formally withdrew from the Human Rights Council after U.N. experts found “reasonable grounds” that the U.S. had “committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks” when it struck a school in Minab, Iran, and a residential area early in the Iran war, killing at least 178 civilians.

A State Department official said the U.S. does not give credibility to the report’s findings and accused the council of “making a mockery of the very ‘rights’ it claims to protect.”

The Pentagon still has not released the results of its investigation into the Minab school strike. A preliminary internal inquiry by the Pentagon reportedly determined the U.S. was likely responsible for the Minab attack. 

And it’s not just the withdrawal from the Human Rights Council that’s causing concern among human rights advocates. 

In November, the U.S. became the first country to skip the Universal Periodic Review, a process in which U.N. member states conduct peer reviews of human rights records.

“What we see is at every opportunity, the U.S. is trying to target or limit outside opportunities for accountability,” Klasing said. “The U.S. just by their actions are demonstrating that they just don’t really care what the collateral impact might be of damaging human rights institutions.”

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From MS Now.