Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday slapped personal sanctions on United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, in a bizarre through-the-looking-glass statement, every word of which is either a lie or used to mean the opposite of what it means in ordinary language.
Rubio barefacedly wrote, “Today, I am imposing sanctions on Francesca Paola Albanese, the United Nations Human Rights Council “Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967,” pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.” Albanese has directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries. Neither the United States nor Israel is party to the Rome Statute, making this action a gross infringement on the sovereignty of both countries.”
So let me explain why this verbiage is arrant nonsense, like most of what comes out of little Marco’s mouth.
The nationals of Israel and the United States being investigated by the International Criminal Court are committing war crimes in Palestine. They are not being charged with crimes committed on Israeli or U.S. soil, such that national sovereignty might come into play.
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You may as well say that the US-backed Nuremberg trials violated Japanese and German sovereignty. Or that the International Criminal Court’s warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin for his invasion and occupation of part of Ukraine violated Russian sovereignty. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is signatory to the Rome Statute that underpins the ICC, but the US State Department has been ecstatic about that warrant.
At least it always was before, and I’m not aware that Rubio has changed that position. He has admitted that Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine, while saying it is necessary to speak to Putin to end the war.
Consistency of principle has never been a source of angst for Mr. Rubio, who in 2017 scolded then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for declining to so characterize Putin. He said at that time, “It should not be hard to say that Vladimir Putin’s military has conducted war crimes in Aleppo because it is never acceptable, you would agree, for a military to specifically target civilians, which is what’s happened there through the Russian military.”
That statement would appear on the face of it to be an interference in both Russian and Syrian sovereignty.
In fact, Rubio, having savaged Putin many times, is now acting exactly like him.
When the International Criminal Court indicted the Russian president, the Russian Federation’s State Investigative Committee opened a case against the ICC judges, charging them with “knowingly accusing an innocent person of a crime” and of “preparing an attack on a representative of a foreign state enjoying international protection, in order to complicate international relations.”
Cole’s Law: All ass-covering official gobbledygook all around the world sounds exactly the same.
In point of fact, the International Criminal Court has excellent grounds for issuing warrants for war crimes committed in Palestine. In 1993, the US government sponsored the Oslo Peace Accords, which created the Palestine Authority and promised it control over all of Palestine by the late 1990s. That is, the US recognized the PA as the legitimate indigenous authority in the West Bank and Gaza, and Washington and Tel Aviv both promised to relinquish the entirety of that territory to it.
In 2012, the Palestine Authority was recognized by the United Nations General Assembly as a non-member observer state, a status previously enjoyed by the Vatican. That status gave the Palestine Authority, now styled the State of Palestine, the prerogative to sit on UN committees and to sign the Rome Statute, which it did in 2015.
The International Criminal Court therefore has jurisdiction over war crimes committed by individuals in Palestine. In fact, since Ukraine is not a signatory, but simply gave the ICC an informal go-ahead, the court has a much stronger claim to judging war crimes taking place in Palestine than it does those in Ukraine, for which it issued a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin.
The Palestine Authority forwarded the war crimes being committed in the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli authorities to the court in 2018. The court took the time to decide if it indeed had jurisdiction, and in 2021 its justices reached the conclusion that they did. They reached that conclusion despite a terrifying campaign of intimidation launched at them by Israeli intelligence, which included Mafia-like personal confrontations in private settings.
Tellingly, the sanctions on Albanese come after she presented a report on the dozens of companies implicated in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and atrocities in the Palestinian West Bank, urging that they be boycotted.
“Justice behind Bars,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2025
Albanese said at a press conference over the some 21 months of Israel’s total war on Gaza, that the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange had jumped 200 percent, gaining $220bn in market value. In contrast, the Palestinians of Gaza have been genocided and made homeless and penniless. She observed, “One people enriched, one people erased. Clearly, for some, genocide is profitable.”
Rubio’s frantic attempt at sanctions was designed to protect the billionaire genocidaires, the class he serves.
The US cannot actually sanction Albanese if she doesn’t have assets or bank accounts in the US or in dollars, as long as other countries in Europe stand up to Rubio.
By the way, among the offenses against the International Criminal Court that can result in sanctions on individual government officials are:
- (c) Corruptly influencing a witness, obstructing or interfering with the attendance or testimony of a witness, retaliating against a witness for giving testimony or destroying, tampering with or interfering with the collection of evidence;
(d) Impeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the Court for the purpose of forcing or persuading the official not to perform, or to perform improperly, his or her duties;
(e) Retaliating against an official of the Court on account of duties performed by that or another official . . .
I fondly hope that Rubio himself will face justice from the ICC for attempting to sanction its judges and Ms. Albanese. He shouldn’t get too used to jet-setting around the world, since Interpol may want to have words with him.
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