This week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine allowed our case, Smith v. Trump, to move forward. The court rejected the Trump administration's effort to dismiss our challenge to the president's unlawful sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC). The executive order remains blocked, and our clients can continue their crucial human rights work as the case moves forward.
Our challenge stems from Executive Order 14203, which Trump signed on February 6, 2025. The order seeks to ban Americans from sharing information with the head of the ICC's Office of the Prosecutor. It attempts to give the government the authority to harshly punish anyone who communicates information to the ICC – a clear violation of the First Amendment and our clients' freedom of speech.
Our clients have long assisted the ICC in seeking accountability for human rights atrocities. Matthew Smith is the co-founder of Fortify Rights, a nonprofit human rights organization. He has provided the Office of the Prosecutor with evidence of the genocide and forced deportation of Myanmar’s Rohingya people, and has assisted the office in analyzing and developing new sources of evidence regarding related crimes in Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Our other client, Akila Radhakrishnan, is an international human rights lawyer. She has advised the Office of the Prosecutor on investigating sexual and gender-based violence committed against Afghan women under the Taliban, helped the office develop policies on sexual and gender violence, and advocated with the office to investigate genocides by ISIS against the Yazidi people in Iraq and Syria, and by Myanmar’s junta against the Rohingya people in that country.
Because of Trump's executive order, our clients had to stop their important work with the ICC's investigators and prosecutors. We sued, asking the court to declare that the order's speech restrictions are unlawful. We won an injunction that blocked the order while the case proceeds, allowing our clients to resume their work. After the administration's failure to dismiss the case this week, that injunction remains in place and the case will move forward.
The First Amendment does not allow the government to impose sweeping limits on what Americans can say and who they can say it to.
—Our clients’ human rights work is protected by the First Amendment, and the court’s ruling affirms that the executive order is an unlawful ban on that important work. We are pleased that our clients can continue their activism while the case is pending.
Anahita Sotoohi
Staff Attorney, ACLU of Maine
The court's order is not a final ruling on whether the restrictions imposed by the executive order's sanction violate the law. Nevertheless, the court wrote that it had enough to conclude, on the record before it, that “there is a strong likelihood the [order] violated [the clients'] First Amendment rights.” The court also wrote that, under the human rights experts’ “reasonable interpretation,” the executive order was “incompatible” with the federal statute the administration invoked as authority for the sanctions. The court also rejected the administration’s arguments that the human rights experts lacked standing to sue and that their claims were not ready for review.
The international community, including the United States, established the ICC in 1998 to help maintain international peace and security. The ICC investigates and prosecutes crimes of the severest magnitude — including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes — when domestic courts are unwilling or unable to do so. Today, 125 countries have joined the ICC’s founding treaty, known as the Rome Statute. As the lawsuit explains, although the United States has not ratified the Rome Statute, it has supported the ICC’s critical work on a wide range of matters.
In 2020, when President Trump imposed similar sanctions, the ACLU sued on behalf of other human rights experts who were forced to stop working with the ICC. The advocates withdrew their lawsuit when President Joe Biden rescinded the sanctions, but a federal court in a separate suit agreed the sanctions likely violated the First Amendment.
