A Maine resident can temporarily resume his work investigating human rights violations abroad while he sues the Trump administration for sanctions punishing him and others who work with an international court, based on a court order Friday.
Matthew Smith is CEO of the nonprofit Fortify Rights and regularly works with the International Criminal Court’s prosecutors to address genocide and the forced deportation of Myanmar’s Rohingya people. The ICC operates in the Netherlands and serves more than 100 countries as an independent court of last resort for serious crimes when an individual country isn’t able or willing to prosecute.
Smith was barred from that work, his lawyers said, after President Donald Trump announced sanctions against the ICC in February. The sanctions followed the court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war in Gaza.
Neither the United States nor Israel recognizes the court officially, even though the U.S. helped establish the ICC in 1998.
Smith and an international human rights lawyer from New York, Akila Radhakrishnan, sued the administration in April, arguing that these sanctions violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment.
In an order Friday, U.S. District Judge Nancy Torresen granted Smith and Radhakrishnan’s request for a preliminary injunction, allowing them to resume their work while the rest of their lawsuit plays out in federal court.
The federal government’s attorneys have until Aug. 1 to file a reply to Torresen’s order. No appeal to the decision had been filed Monday. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice said Monday they do not comment on pending litigation.
While the Trump administration argued the sanctions advance “an ‘important’ and ‘compelling’ government interest” in protecting United States personnel and allies from the ICC, Torresen wrote in her order, Trump’s sanctions still appear “to restrict substantially more speech than necessary to further that end.”
Torresen said the government hasn’t shown her how Smith’s work undermines the administration’s interest in protecting the United States.
She referenced a federal court decision in 2021, halting a similar order Trump issued against the ICC during his first administration that condemned the court’s investigation of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan. That lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed after then-President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s executive order that April.
“Here too, the Executive Order appears to burden substantially more speech than necessary,” Torresen wrote.
One of Smith’s lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday they were heartened by Torresen’s order.
“The First Amendment does not allow the government to impose sweeping limits on what Americans can say and who they can say it to,” staff attorney Charlie Hogle said in a written statement.