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The UK’s foreign office has warned senior British lawyers they are at risk of sanctions by the Trump administration because of advice they provided to the International Criminal Court on Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Several senior lawyers involved in the ICC’s war crimes case against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant have received the warnings from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, according to people familiar with the matter.
They included a former senior British judge, Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, the Labour peer Baroness Helena Kennedy of the Shaws, and Danny Friedman, a barrister at Matrix Chambers, the people said.
Last year the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in relations to Israel’s offensive in Gaza. The ICC also charged three Hamas leaders who are dead.
Several leading human rights barristers, including Fulford, Kennedy, Friedman and Amal Clooney, had provided advice to the ICC as to whether there was sufficient evidence to charge.
The panel of lawyers, which also included Judge Theodor Meron, former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and Elizabeth Wilmshurst KC, unanimously agreed with the ICC’s decision to file charges.
In February, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on ICC prosecutor Karim Khan and warning that further sanctions “on those responsible for the ICC’s transgressions” could follow.
The sanctions include blocking property and assets and the suspension of entry into the US.
The order gave a 60-day deadline for a subsequent internal recommendation to the president on who else should be placed under sanctions, which would have been April 7.
No further sanctions have been announced. The White House and US state department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FCDO did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The ICC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy and Clooney did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Friedman declined to comment. Fulford, Wilmshurst and Meron could not be immediately reached.
Netanyahu and Gallant have rejected the charges as “absurd and false lies”.
The FCDO warning was first reported by the Observer.
