US Sanctions ICC President Tomoko Akane and Prosecution Lawyer Abdoulaye Seye Under the ICC Sanctions Order; OFAC Issues Wind-Down General License 12

Designation date: August 18, 2026 (OFAC’s recent-actions release date is 08/18/2026, and General License 12 is dated the same day). OFAC added Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national who is president of the International Criminal Court, and Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese national, to the SDN List under its ICC sanctions program tag. OFAC’s page links a State Department release for the same action. The state.gov page was not retrievable from here, so the rationale below comes from Reuters as carried by the Jerusalem Post.

Stated rationale (Reuters, quoting Rubio): “These individuals have directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.” Reuters describes Seye as a senior trial lawyer on the prosecution team that sought the Netanyahu arrest warrant, nominated for election as an ICC judge. That description is Reuters’ and is not in OFAC’s listing.

General License 12 authorizes wind-down transactions involving Akane, Seye, and entities they own half or more of, through 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time, September 17, 2026 (an expiry date). Payments to a blocked person must go into a blocked interest-bearing account in the United States.

Count correction: OFAC’s listing names only Akane and Seye; no wider group of judges is carried (a TRT World count was not verified). The same OFAC action also added an unrelated Venezuela-program entity, not part of this event.

Context: the prior round of individual designations is 2025-08-20–us-sanctions-icc-judges; the later designation of the court itself is a separate timeline entry.