As countries gather for the United Nations General Assembly, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expanding a US campaign to block international scrutiny for violations of international and humanitarian law, amid mounting findings over US war crimes during its aggression against Iran.
In recent weeks, Washington has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council and escalated its campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court, or ICC.
The moves come after a UN fact-finding mission found reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed war crimes in attacks on civilian sites in Minab and Lamerd, while the ICC continues to pursue an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza.
The Minab and Lamerd strikes have become central to international scrutiny of the US aggression against Iran.
A UN mission found reasonable grounds to believe that US forces committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks in the two strikes, which hit civilian infrastructure and caused significant civilian casualties.
In Minab, a US strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School killed more than 150 people, including about 120 children, according to the UN findings.
In Lamerd, the UN mission examined a US strike on a sports facility and residential area that caused 22 civilian casualties and concluded that the attack was indiscriminate.
The findings add to a record of international scrutiny over the use of US military force against Iran, with UN experts previously raising concerns over the legality of US attacks and the possible international crime of aggression.
The US government has rejected the UN findings, while Washington has simultaneously intensified efforts to restrict the international institutions responsible for investigating and pursuing accountability for war crimes.
In August, Rubio announced sanctions against 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 US push to dismantle the court, Rubio described the sanctions as part of a campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick.”
Senior US officials placed calls to countries urging them to withdraw from the ICC and reject its authority to prosecute Americans, including by putting diplomatic pressure on nations that “enjoy the benefits of the US security umbrella” and rely on US assistance.
The United States 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 US 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, including deportations to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, boat strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, and deadly attacks on civilians during the US aggression against Iran.
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.”
US 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 US 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.
Yet when Rubio served in the US Senate, he urged the ICC to investigate after war erupted between Russia, another nonmember, and Ukraine.
Rubio co-sponsored a resolution to bring war-crimes complaints against Russian President Vladimir Putin to the ICC and urged 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 deepened as the court has pursued Israeli regime 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 resulted in warrants for the arrest of two senior Taliban leaders.
While the ICC has never charged a US leader, in 2024 it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu related to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, a move criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Since the US began its pressure campaign, only two countries — Venezuela and Chad — have left the ICC, joining Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which left earlier this year.
Though the ICC is a separate body, the United Nations has consistently reaffirmed its importance.
“It remains for us a critical cog in the international justice system,” UN Secretary General spokesman Stéphane Dujarric recently said of the ICC amid US efforts to undermine it.
The US is pushing back against international scrutiny through other channels as well.
On the eve of the UN General Assembly, the United States formally withdrew from the Human Rights Council after UN experts found “reasonable grounds” that the US had “committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks” when it struck the school in Minab and a residential area during its aggression against Iran, killing at least 178 civilians.
A State Department official said the United States 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.
In November, the United States became the first country to skip the Universal Periodic Review, a process in which UN member states conduct peer reviews of human rights records.
“What we see is at every opportunity, the US is trying to target or limit outside opportunities for accountability,” Klasing said. “The US just by their actions are demonstrating that they just don’t really care what the collateral impact might be of damaging human rights institutions.”