This time the European Parliament has handed its best-known human rights award to an institution rather than to an individual dissident. This year’s Sakharov Prize will be shared by the ICC in The Hague and its officials, Parliament President Roberta Metsola told MEPs in Strasbourg on Thursday.
The timing makes the choice hard to read as anything other than a message to the White House. Only days earlier, the Trump administration had unveiled a fresh and far-reaching round of sanctions against the tribunal in The Hague, adding to measures that since 2025 have hit its prosecutors, judges and staff. The administration’s anger stems from inquiries that reach American conduct and that of friendly governments such as Israel’s.
Metsola framed the decision as a defence of the rules-based order. A Union founded on cooperation between nations and on shared institutions, she argued, has to stand by them, and the prize honours the court’s role in upholding international law. Many MEPs want to go further: they have repeatedly asked the European Commission to switch on the bloc’s blocking statute, a legal shield that would neutralise the effect of foreign sanctions inside the EU and could protect those who work for the court.
The ICC thanked Parliament, saying the recognition arrived as it faces challenges without precedent, including sanctions designed to disrupt its judicial work. In a world of multiplying wars, the Hague judges argue, durable settlements depend on holding perpetrators to account.
Set up under the Rome Statute, which every EU member state has joined, the court prosecutes individuals for the worst offences known to international law, from genocide and war crimes to aggression, stepping in only when national courts cannot or will not act.
Metsola also used the moment to recognise jailed Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu, and Taraneh and Romina Rahimi, two young Iranian women of whom one faces a death sentence and the other decades behind bars. The prize, created in 1988 and named after Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, will be handed over at the December plenary session.
