Four organizations sued the Trump administration on August 12 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, asking the court to strike down Executive Order 14203 and the sanctions designations issued under it [1]. The plaintiffs are Human Rights Watch, the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Open Society Institute [1]. They bring claims under the First and Fifth Amendments, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act [1].
Reading the order clarifies what they are challenging. Executive Order 14203, signed February 6, 2025, declares a national emergency over efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute what it calls protected persons of the United States and its allies without those countries' consent [2]. Section 1 blocks the property of anyone who directly engaged in such an ICC effort against a protected person without that person's country's consent, along with anyone who provided material or financial support for it, and any entity they own or control [2]. Section 8(d) defines protected persons as US citizens, service members, and officials, and the personnel of NATO allies or major non-NATO allies that have not consented to ICC jurisdiction [2]. Section 4 suspends entry into the United States of designated individuals and their immediate family [2].
Under that authority, the government designated ICC prosecutor Karim Khan; Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories; and three Palestinian human-rights groups, Al-Haq, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights [1].
The plaintiffs' theory turns on what a blocking sanction does inside the United States. Once a person is designated, US persons are generally barred from transacting with or providing services to them, and the four groups argue that the work they exist to do, communicating and collaborating with the designated individuals and organizations, participating in ICC proceedings, and conducting research and advocacy, is exactly what the designations now put at legal risk [1]. That is the basis for the First Amendment claim: the groups say the order restricts their speech and their association with specific people the government has named [1].
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act claim is the less familiar one. One plaintiff, the American Friends Service Committee, is a Quaker organization, and a RFRA claim requires showing that a federal action substantially burdens the exercise of religion. The complaint's specific religious-exercise theory is not spelled out in the available filing coverage, and it is one of the parts of this case an editor should watch as the pleadings become public.
Nothing here has been decided. This is a facial challenge to the order and the designations, and the government has not answered it. What makes the suit worth marking now is the instrument the plaintiffs are aiming at a sanctions program: not a foreign-policy argument about the ICC, but a domestic claim that emergency economic powers cannot be used to bar Americans from speaking with people the executive has placed on a list.
