[Zachary Marcone is a U.S. lawyer and degree candidate at Stanford Law School.]
On 9 October 2026, the United States sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an institution. Although the United States previously sanctioned individual ICC prosecutors and judges, this is the first time it has specifically targeted the institution itself. The U.S. sanctions are an existential threat to the ICC as they will make it extremely difficult for the Court to access services that are essential to its day-to-day operations. To protect the Court, several MEPs and member states such as Belgium have called on the European Union to use its blocking statute to neutralize some of the effects of the U.S. sanctions. The European Commission itself has threatened “to take any necessary measures to enable the Court to carry out its work,” possibly an implicit reference to the blocking statute.
The EU blocking statute is designed to protect entities within the European Union from the application of a third country’s extraterritorial laws. The blocking statute does this by making foreign court judgments that give effect to such extraterritorial laws unenforceable in European courts. The statute also prohibits EU operators from complying with the extraterritorial foreign law unless they obtain a waiver. Thus far, the European Union has used the blocking statute sparingly and only to block certain U.S. sanctions on Cuba and Iran.
Failed EU Efforts to Counteract Extraterritorial U.S. Tax Laws
This is not the first time the European Union has threatened tough action against the United States for the latter’s extraterritorial laws. In 2014, the United States unilaterally imposed an extraterritorial tax reporting regime on EU financial institutions and other entities. Financial institutions in the European Union are required to report the account information of U.S. persons to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to aid U.S. authorities in the fight against tax evasion. However, the United States does not reciprocate by compelling U.S. banks to share the account information of EU persons to European tax authorities. This asymmetry in tax reporting obligations can be exploited by EU persons that want to avoid paying tax to their home governments.
The European Union has repeatedly attempted to get the United States to join the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), a multilateral standard that provides for the reciprocal exchange of tax information. For example, in 2018 the European Union threatened to put the United States on its list of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions, i.e. the tax blacklist, if the United States continued to refuse reciprocity in tax reporting. When the deadline came, the United States still had not joined CRS, and the European Union backed down from its blacklisting threat. To this day, the European Union is still trying to get the United States to reciprocate tax reporting. All the while, EU banks incur costs to ensure they comply with U.S. reporting obligations.
