Lawsuit
Published on February 1, 2025
Our client Eric Iverson is a fifth-generation South Dakotan and the first person in his family not to work as a farmer or rancher. He is a veteran of the U.S. Army, including the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps, and has been a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 2010. At the ICC, he leads a team that investigates war crimes and other atrocities committed in Darfur.
In February 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order imposing financial sanctions against ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, putting him on the same Treasury Department sanctions list that is used to punish human rights violators, international terrorists, and drug kingpins. Because Khan is Iverson’s ultimate supervisor, Iverson was at risk of being prosecuted criminally or subjected to large civil penalties if he continued doing his job, because he could have been seen as providing “services” to a sanctioned person. As a result, Iverson and many of his colleagues had to stop their work, including investigations of ongoing atrocities in Sudan.
We sued the U.S. government, asserting that Iverson’s First Amendment right to free speech was violated by the U.S. sanctions. We sought an injunction to prevent the U.S. government from prosecuting Iverson or imposing sanctions-related financial penalties on him just for doing his job in support of accountability for war crimes.
After an initial court conference in May 2025, the government capitulated and issued a Treasury Department license that recognized Iverson is entitled to perform all his job functions, allowing us to withdraw the litigation.
