ICC Prosecutor Says Trump’s Threats to Target Iranian Energy Infrastructure Could Constitute War Crimes

Luis Moreno Ocampo, the founding chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian infrastructure could constitute war crimes under the same legal framework the ICC used to indict Russian officials over the war in Ukraine.

“My suggestion: you read the indictment of the Russians, change the name, and it is very similar,” Ocampo said at an Institute of Politics forum at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The event, moderated by HKS Professor Kathryn Sikkink, was co-sponsored by the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy. The discussion covered the ICC’s role in conflicts in Venezuela, Iran, and Gaza, as well as Ocampo’s 2022 book “War and Justice in the 21st Century.”

The ICC indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin, his minister of defense, his chief of staff, and two generals for destroying Ukraine’s civilian electricity system. Ocampo argued that because targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime, a comparable order from Trump would carry similar legal exposure.

“This is a civil target, not a military one,” Ocampo said of the Russian case. “So if President Trump ordered this and effectively destroyed civil targets,” the basis for indictment would follow.

Ocampo acknowledged that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Iran, which has never ratified the Rome Statute, the court’s founding treaty. But he noted the court gained jurisdiction over Russian crimes because they were committed on Ukrainian territory, a state party to the treaty.

He also said the ICC is effectively barred from prosecuting the crime of aggression — the act of launching an unlawful war — because the U.S., France, and the United Kingdom inserted conditions at a 2010 review conference in Kampala, Uganda, that block such cases.

Ocampo argued that the central shift in international law after the Cold War was treating violent leaders as criminals subject to legal proceedings rather than as enemies to be defeated militarily.

“The main idea that the book explained is the new thing that happened after the Cold War was this idea to treat violent people as criminals, not as enemies,” he said. “In the domestic setting, the violent people could be criminals that have rights. In the wars, enemies have no rights — legally, you don’t need to give them any notice to kill them.”

He said framing adversaries as enemies rather than criminals has historically led to catastrophic outcomes, pointing to Cold War-era U.S. strategy in South America. The U.S. trained national armies to fight guerrillas, he said, and those armies turned on their own citizens.

“These strategies led our armies to attack its own nationals, and that happened,” Ocampo said. "That will be disaster.”

Sikkink raised the Trump administration’s use of military force against Nicolás Maduro and strikes against boats in the Caribbean, asking whether the ICC could have offered a legal alternative.

Ocampo argued the U.S. cannot legally be at war with a drug trafficking organization.

“You cannot be in war with a drug dealer group,” he said. “They are not conducting hostilities against the U.S. They are just selling drugs here.”

Ocampo pointed to the case of former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, whom he indicted while serving as prosecutor. When Bashir traveled to South Africa, a local judge ordered police to detain him — demonstrating, Ocampo said, that ICC warrants constrain leaders who believe they are untouchable.

He also proposed that the UN Security Council could temporarily suspend ICC arrest warrants as leverage in peace talks — for instance, suspending the warrant against Putin to incentivize a ceasefire on Ukraine.

Ocampo ended the forum by warning that the world is “on a very fast train to the third World War,” urging students to push for institutional change.

“We are celebrating innovation in technology and we are missing innovation in public affairs,” he said. “That’s our job, guys. Transform this. You are the ones who can do it.”