English · Français (coming) · Deutsch (coming)
On 20 August 2025, Nicolas Guillou, a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, was added to a United States sanctions list for his part in the arrest warrant against Israel’s prime minister. Within days his Visa and Mastercard cards stopped working. His Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and Expedia accounts were closed, and so was his Booking account, a company run from Amsterdam and owned in Connecticut. Parcels were refused when the carrier was UPS. He could no longer book a hotel or a trip online. He described it as travelling thirty years back in time. His Slovenian colleague Beti Hohler, sanctioned for the same warrant, had her Apple ID and iCloud blocked, and a European bank she had been with for decades closed her account the day after.
None of this happened in America. It happened in the Netherlands, to European citizens, judges of a court that 125 states created by treaty, for doing their job. Thirteen of the Court’s judges, prosecutors and staff are now under the same sanctions, including, since August 2026, the Court’s own president. In February 2026, France’s president wrote to Washington asking for them to be lifted, for Judge Guillou and for Thierry Breton, a former European Commissioner targeted over the European Union’s own digital rules. Judge Guillou still cannot use his bank card, and no European institution has the power to give it back to him.
Continue reading “Independence, or the end of the client state”