The Luxembourg state bank Spuerkeess has blocked 17 million euros worth of accounts from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The newspaper reports this Luxemburger Wort Monday. The court is said to have had two accounts at the Luxembourg bank, which were recently blocked. Spuerkeess was “apparently concerned about endangering its business relations with the US,” the newspaper concludes.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against, among others, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity due to Israel’s war of destruction in Gaza. That arrest warrant damages the security of its ally the US, at least in the view of US President Donald Trump. He promptly imposed sanctions against a dozen ICC employees. They no longer enter the US and are often no longer able to make online bookings, because the American companies that regulate international payment transactions often strictly adhere to the sanctions. The sanctions do not apply to the ICC as an institution.
Although Spuerkeess generally has little to do with the US, the bank still seemed too risky to leave the ICC accounts (which are not in the names of sanctioned ICC employees) open, according to the Luxemburger Wort. The Luxembourg Ministry of Finance responded to the newspaper: “It is up to the bank itself to decide how it responds to sanctions or possible sanctions.” A spokesman for Prime Minister Luc Frieden said: “This is not a file for which he is responsible or over which he has supervised.”
The separation between Spuerkeess and the Luxumburg government apparatus is “notoriously porous”, according to the newspaper, with Finance officials sitting on the bank’s decision-making bodies. Opposition parties are reacting furiously to the issue. “Spuerkeess is a state-owned bank. If this bank closes accounts of the International Criminal Court, this is not only a matter of compliance with the rules, but also a political issue,” MP Sam Tanson (Déi Gréng) told Luxemburger Wort. By closing the ICC accounts, the country is contributing to the destruction of the rules-based world order, according to MP Yves Cruchten (LSAP). “This is a capitulation to the law of the jungle.” He warns against “the normalization of a world in which rules are replaced by power.”
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