ICC judge details horror of sanctions

French judge Nicolas Guillou, who serves on the International Criminal Court (ICC), has told a French TV station how he is financially paralysed because the US sanctioned him last year for doing his job. That job? To issue a war crimes arrest warrant for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

Guillou’s predicament was explained by human rights law expert Ramy Abdul:

A transcript of the video is shown below:

I discovered that almost all payment methods, in fact, in France today, well they are American.

Your credit card no longer works.

Well, it was disconnected because in fact, the only cards we have in France are Visa and MasterCard.

I can no longer order on Amazon, I can no longer book an Airbnb. I tried, for example, to book a hotel on Booking.com.

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I understand that the transaction is blocked.

I made a transaction with Expedia.

I received an email that says: My transaction is cancelled. It’s very painful on a daily basis.

We go back thirty years. This is the Time Machine. In fact, we are returning to the pre-digital world.

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Another example. The judge is therefore in the Netherlands, he orders a frame in Brittany. Except that since it is by UPS, it will never be delivered.

So, faced with this grotesque situation of a judge on the same blacklist as the worst terrorists and drug traffickers in the world, the President of the [French] Republic wrote this letter to ask for the lifting of sanctions.

If prosecutors are afraid to prosecute, if lawyers are afraid to defend, if judges are afraid to judge, if parliamentarians are afraid to vote on laws, if ministers are afraid to apply them, there is no more democracy.

This means that we will act exclusively out of fear.

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Guillou is unfortunately not unique. His ICC colleague, Canadian judge Kimberley Prost, and United Nations human rights specialist Francesca Albanese have also been hit with sanctions which, as Prost said last year, are supposed to be restricted to terrorists and organised crime bosses.

Israel and the US are mafioso terror states.

Featured image via the Canary