On 1 September 2026 Banca Popolare Etica suspended the account of the association behind Autistici/Inventati, and explained itself in public. The bank had contacted the Italian banking association, ABI, the association of cooperative banks, Assopopolari, and the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and was acting, its statement says, in the absence of any ruling or guidance from Italian and European institutions.
On the website of the UIF, the financial intelligence unit housed in the Banca d’Italia, a page on countering the financing of terrorism says that lists drawn up by other bodies, the Office of Foreign Assets Control among them, are published there only to help assess whether a transaction is suspicious, and that being named on such a list does not in itself create any obligation to freeze funds.
The page carries a modification date of 29 September 2026, but the substance is older. In November 2025, ten months before the designation, the same page already said that the UIF circulates the OFAC list to support possible reports, but that no obligation to freeze funds attaches to it. The wording has since become firmer, from supporting reports to solely helping assess them, and from no obligation to not in itself an obligation.
The old wording was still there on 24 August 2026, two days before the designation. Somewhere in the five weeks that contain the designation, the bank’s statement and the collective’s closure, the page was rewritten, with no explanation on it. (Vetinari: Clerks do not, as a rule, improve a sentence for the pleasure of it.)
Part of the bank’s question had an answer in the state’s own words, written down long before the bank asked it, and nobody read it out. (Vetinari: A thing written down has been dealt with. A thing said aloud has to be dealt with again.)
Rule by list followed what a designation does: a signature in Washington, and then a series of private intermediaries each deciding alone that a customer is not worth the risk. Over-compliance, it concluded, is not a side effect of the instrument but the instrument. What it left aside is the other half of the arithmetic. A compliance department weighs the cost of keeping a listed customer against whatever cover is on offer for keeping it. The designation sets the first number. Everyone else sets the second, and for the most part they set it by doing nothing.
This essay is about that second number, in three places that had reason to speak: Rome, where the collective lived; The Hague, where the International Criminal Court lives; and Brussels, which has had a digital sovereignty agenda for a decade and a blocking statute for three. Over the same weeks, the United States moved against both the collective and the Court. The responses were not the same, and the ways in which they differ say more than either case alone.
Two lists, one month, no hearing
The collective was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist on 26 August 2026. Within a fortnight its domain was on hold at the .org registry, PayPal had closed its donation account, the bank had suspended and then closed its account, and on 6 September it announced it would shut down. Services ended on 18 September. An urgent application against the bank has been pending at the Court of Pisa since 8 September. The collective’s lawyer expected a hearing to be fixed quickly, though probably not before 25 September, when the American licence ran out. No order has been published.
The Court’s turn came in instalments. On 18 August the United States designated its President, Judge Tomoko Akane, and a senior trial lawyer, Abdoulaye Seye, bringing the count, by the Court’s own reckoning, to nine of its eighteen judges, both deputy prosecutors, the former prosecutor and one staff member. The wind-down licence for the two new names expired on 17 September. Around 20 September the Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported that sanctions against the Court as a whole had been prepared. On 22 September the American President used the General Assembly to call on states to leave the Court; by the end of that week one small state had said it would.
The legal instruments differ. The collective sits under Executive Order 13224, the counter-terrorism order; the Court’s officials under the order written for the Court. The mechanism does not differ. In both cases nothing happens to anyone in Washington. What happens is that banks, registries, payment processors, software vendors and insurers with any American exposure read a list and decide.
The Hague: hands off, whose hands
The Netherlands has spoken about the Court more, and more often, than any other government in this account. The Prime Minister, Rob Jetten, told the General Assembly on 24 September to keep hands off the ICC and off the other institutions that protect the international legal order. The speech describes attempts to undermine the Court. It does not say whose attempts. The United States is not named in it, nor is its President.
The Foreign Minister, Tom Berendsen, was less coy in front of a microphone. On 19 August he told NOS that the Netherlands of course disapproved of the sanctions, that he had raised them in person with his American counterpart, Rubio, a few weeks earlier, and that this had unfortunately not yet been effective. He called the language Washington uses about the Court very fierce, and declined to answer in kind: the task, as he put it, was to disapprove diplomatically while doing everything to let the Court keep working. The culprit is named; the register is chosen so that the naming lands nowhere in particular. According to the Rights Forum, the written statement of the same day did not say who had imposed the sanctions, and a ministry spokesperson pointed to confidential diplomacy.
On paper the reticence lifts. A letter to the House of Representatives of 1 December 2025 names the United States, commits the cabinet to engaging Dutch business against over-compliance, offers the Court knowledge and expertise for its digital independence rather than services, and promises to push for activating the EU blocking statute if new American sanctions were to seriously impede the Court’s functioning. A letter to Parliament can apparently say what a podium cannot. (Vetinari: One names names in private, where it is useful, and never from a podium, where it would merely be true.)
The House has asked for more than the cabinet has givwn. A motion in October 2025 asked the cabinet to work in the EU for applying the blocking statute and to defend the Court publicly, and was adopted with a broad majority. A second, in April 2026, repeated the request and passed 79 to 71.
In New York on 22 September, hours after the American President’s speech, the minister told the Volkskrant that the Netherlands had asked the Commission to have the statute ready, so that this paardenmiddel, a horse remedy, a cure drastic enough to be feared in its own right, could be used, and that the Netherlands was prepared to use it. In the same breath it became the last resort: as long as the Court can be protected in other ways, it will be, because a remedy of that kind is not for sending a signal and could make the matter escalate further.
At a committee debate on 30 September the instrument stayed, in the reported phrase, ready for use once the Court is paralysed; PRO, D66, SP and DENK wanted it now, VVD, CDA, ChristenUnie and PVV wanted to wait, and the cabinet undertook to keep the House informed, confidentially if necessary, about further sanctions.
A last resort held back for fear of escalation has a curious property. Its whole value lies in the prospect of use, and every day it stays unused is a day of evidence about the conditions under which it will be. Whoever is being deterred can read that evidence as well as anyone. Waiting until the Court is paralysed announces that anything short of paralysis is affordable. (Vetinari: The difficulty with a last resort is that everybody else can count how many resorts come first.)
Meanwhile the Court has not waitrd. It replaced its Microsoft workplace with openDesk, changed insurers and financial providers to firms without an American footprint, and is reported to be paying staff months in advance. The host state’s banks, asked about their policy on the American sanctions list, declined to answer, all five of them, citing client confidentiality.
On the collective, the Dutch government has said nothing at all. No public statement from Foreign Affairs, Justice, Economic Affairs, Finance or the central bank has been found. A search of the House’s documents for “Autistici” returns nothing, because the one parliamentary text on the case calls it A/I. On 10 September two members, Barbara Kathmann (PRO) and Sarah El Boujdaini (D66), tabled fifteen written questions on the consequences of American sanctions for the European internet sector, asking for answers before the debate of 30 September. On 28 September the Foreign Minister postponed the answer, citing the need for coordination between ministries. The eighth question asks whether the cabinet condemns the United States for putting internet providers on a terrorism list for political reasons. It has not been answered.
Part of an answer already existed, from inside the Dutch state. Two days before the questions were tabled, Arda Gerkens, who chairs the ATKM, the Dutch authority for terrorist and child sexual abuse material online, told NRC that her authority takes the EU sanctions list as its main yardstick and does not treat the American list as a criterion; any country can call an organisation terrorist, and her authority may see it very differently. Her remark concerns a different field, the removal of content rather than the closing of accounts, and it carries no minister’s voice behind it. (Vetinari: A regulator may say a thing in a newspaper precisely because a minister has not said it in the House. That is one of the things regulators are for.)
Rome: filed under unsaid
Italy is where the collective was registered, where its bank was, where its money still is, and where its case is being heard. No statement on the designation has been found from the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Interior Minister, the Justice Minister, the Farnesina or Palazzo Chigi. Asked at the end of September, the innovation department at Palazzo Chigi declined to comment. Marco Cappato, who is not in government, asked on Euronews how it can be that Italy, as a government, has nothing to say to its American allies about the matter.
Silence is not quite the right word for Rome, because parts of the governing majority did speak, in the other direction. On 2 September two Fratelli d’Italia politicians, the MEP Carlo Fidanza and the deputy Augusta Montaruli, deposited an esposto asking the prosecutors in Pisa to establish whether offences had been committed, aiding and abetting among them, and to look at individual members. Montaruli, with her party colleague Donzelli, also tabled an interpellanza, 2-00913, on the designation and its effects in Italy; no answer has been found. In Brussels Fidanza and twenty other ECR members filed priority question P-10-2026-003407 on 1 September, about a Commission official who in 2018 had co-founded the association that runs the collective. Six weeks before the designation, an under-secretary at the Interior Ministry had represented Italy at the American Secretary of State’s ministerial on far-left terrorism, reportedly to follow how the United States designates groups.
So Fratelli d’Italia’s sharpest move, as far as can be found, was to take a foreign executive listing, issued without a hearing, and offer it to a domestic prosecutor as a reason to look at named Italians. A designation needs no Italian court. Here it was offered one anyway, and asked to investigate Italians, not to review the listing. (Vetinari: Some people stand aside. Others, more usefully, hold the door, and expect to be remembered for it.)
The opposition spoke through individuals. The MEP Brando Benifei announced a question to the Commission within two days of the designation, saying the measure struck a service intermediary indiscriminately and tied it without proof to possible illicit uses by third parties; the deputy Andrea Casu asked how American sanctions had come to have direct effects on digital services in Italy. Their words are in the press. In the Senate, a group of PD senators, Cristina Tajani and Francesco Boccia among them, tabled written question 4-03340, published on 14 September, which opens with the designation of 26 August. In the Camera, AVS deputies Piccolotti, Zanella and Bonelli among others tabled a second interpellanza, 2-00921, published the same day. No answer to either has been found.
Against all of this sits the UIF sentence. It is not a ruling on the case. It is standing text, there in substance since at least November 2025. But it answers, in advance and in the state’s own voice, the legal question underneath the bank’s request to the state: does an OFAC listing oblige an Italian bank to freeze? The bank’s own president and counsel said at a webinar on 9 September that there was no automatism and no obligation. The collective’s lawyer argues the same at Pisa. The bank’s director general, Nazzareno Gabrielli, told L’Indipendente that the funds remain the association’s property but stay blocked, because moving them without a specific OFAC authorisation, which the sanctioned party could apply for, would expose the bank to secondary sanctions.
Everyone on the record, in other words, agreed that no Italian rule required the freeze. What was missing was cover that a bank of 130,000 customers and members could point to when asked why it had kept one customer that Washington disliked. The bank asked for that. ABI and Assopopolari, Gabrielli said, took up the request and assured the bank of their commitment. From the institutions themselves, which the bank had been writing to since September 2025, it had so far received no answers. A ruling from Pisa may yet supply it. A press release would have repeated what the UIF page already said. What the bank asked for in the letter it co-signed on 1 October was an instrument.
A European court had in fact said part of it aloud, eleven weeks before the listing. On 11 June the Court of Justice held, in Jenec, that a name on the OFAC list does not on its own justify refusing a payment account with basic features; the bank has to assess the customer itself, with the listing as one factor among others. The judgment rests on the Payment Accounts Directive, which protects consumers, natural persons acting outside their trade, and Gabrielli pointed out to L’Indipendente that an association is not one, and that the ruling does nothing against secondary sanctions. When two Five Star MEPs, Danilo Della Valle and Dario Tamburrano, wrote to the Commission on 10 September, they cited the judgment by date and argued that the freeze ran counter to it. The protection stopped at the edge of legal personhood and at the edge of the dollar system, which is where the collective was standing. (Vetinari: The law had been perfectly clear. It had simply been clear about somebody else.)
The Court gets the same treatment, minus the hostility. Italy did not sign the joint statement of support in February 2025, having signed a similar one in June 2024, and did not explain why. It has since been referred to the Assembly of States Parties over its handling of the Almasri warrant, which gives the government a dispute of its own with the Court. No government reaction to the August designations has been found. The Foreign Minister’s General Assembly speech two days after the American President’s chose, in its own phrase, “the strength of law” against “the law of the strongest”, and did not mention the Court.
Brussels: the toolbox, unopened
The European Union speaks about the Court in the way institutions speak when they mean it and do not intend to act on it yet. Kaja Kallas, the High Representative, issued a statement on 19 August regretting the designations and promising full support for the protection of the Court and its staff. In New York on 21 September she said the Union had tools in its toolbox for when it gets really serious, and did not say which tools, or what really serious would look like. António Costa told the General Assembly that threats and attacks against the Court were unacceptable. On 19 August he and Ursula von der Leyen had posted on X, in near-identical words, that they stand firmly with the Court and its President, and that its judges and officials must be able to act without external pressure. Where the pressure came from, the posts did not say. (Vetinari: A toolbox that is never opened remains a very fine toolbox. People speak well of it for years.)
The tool everybody means is the blocking statute, Council Regulation 2271/96, which forbids EU operators to comply with foreign sanctions listed in its annex and can be extended to new ones by a Commission delegated act. Spain wrote to the Commission President in May asking for exactly that, covering the Court’s judges and prosecutors and the UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and planned to raise it at the June European Council. The conclusions of that Council do not mention the Court. On 29 September a Commission spokesperson said that diplomatic efforts remain the preferred option and that the Commission was in constant discussion with the member states about the statute. The Commission’s own page on the statute records no activity after 2021. In February the Commission had answered a parliamentary question by listing a delegated act amending the statute among the measures under consideration, next to a preference for diplomatic outreach and targeted solutions. Eight months on, both halves of that sentence still hold.
There is a reason for caution beyond diplomacy. The statute protects EU operators, and the Court is an international organisation, not an EU company; commentators have doubted that it would shield the institution itself as opposed to the European banks and vendors that serve it. That doubt is real. It is also a doubt about the reach of the instrument, which is a different thing from a reason to leave it holstered while its reach is argued.
On the collective, no EU institution has named it: not the Commission President, not the High Representative, not the Council, not the Commissioner responsible for technological sovereignty, not the European Data Protection Supervisor. Benifei’s priority question, P-10-2026-003526, dated 7 September and co-signed by twenty-eight colleagues, asked whether the Commission had independently checked the American accusations and how it would protect the Union’s regulatory autonomy.
Della Valle and Tamburrano, who sit with The Left group, filed a written question, E-10-2026-003612, on 10 September, and on 24 September Benedetta Scuderi and Ilaria Salis a third, on protection against third-country financial sanctions, on whether digital services lawfully run in the Union remain governed by Union law, and on American classifications of antifascism as terrorism. At the start of October none of the three had an answer, and neither had the question about the official.
The only Commission reaction on record concerns its own official: a spokesperson for the communications directorate said the matter was being examined and reminded staff of the rules on outside activities. The Union’s first public words connected with the case, in other words, were a conflict-of-interest review prompted by Fratelli d’Italia MEPs.
The Union had part of an answer on file here too. Article 8 of the Digital Services Act forbids general monitoring obligations for intermediaries. The American theory of the case, as Rule by list set out, reads the anonymity and encryption a provider offers as features built to support operations. EDRi said on 3 September that the designation attacked the Union’s intermediary liability regime directly, and asked for the blocking statute to be extended to non-profits and intermediaries. No institution repeated it; inside Parliament it surfaced only as a footnote to Benifei’s question, citing the hosting liability rule of Article 6.
Every discussion of the blocking statute found among institutions and member states concerns the Court, sometimes with Albanese added. The collective does not appear in any of them. The statute’s annex does not cover Executive Order 13224, as Verfassungsblog noted, so even an activation for the Court would leave the collective’s case where it is. On 28 September, in Dublin, two MEPs, Aurore Lalucq and Dirk Gotink, called the protection of the Court a major test for Europe and set it against Europe’s dependence on American financial and cloud services. The collective, whose loss of a bank account a month earlier was the purest available instance of the test, was not mentioned.
A mosquito on the wall
The fifth of the Dutch parliamentary questions reads, in translation: how does the cabinet respond to the situation of ProcoliX, a company that, as a result of the American intervention against the Italian A/I, no longer takes on work from the International Criminal Court? The question rests on an NRC report of 8 September on fear of American sanctions in the European internet sector. The company’s director, Koen de Jonge, said he wanted to help the Court, but had told it that ProcoliX could not go on working for it like this, being too vulnerable, and was withdrawing from a project to do more for it.
The same article carried a subheading: European authorities are silent. Ruud Alaerds, director of the Dutch Cloud Community, an association of Dutch internet companies, told NRC that the quiet was notable, just as it had been around the American attacks on the Court, and gave his diagnosis in four words: “We willen geen ruzie.” Nobody wants a fight. An industry body had linked the two silences within a fortnight of the listing.
A Dutch hosting company read the American action against an Italian collective that nobody defended, recalculated its own exposure, and stepped back from further work for a court that its own government is defending at the General Assembly. The defended node was reached through the undefended one. The host state’s careful conditionality about the Court, its readiness to act once the Court is paralysed, meets a firm that did not wait for the Court to be listed as a whole, because a server collective in Pisa showed it what happens to the people standing near a name.
That is how a dependency graph propagates. It does not respect the categories that statements are written in. A government can decide that a court of 125 states parties deserves protection and a volunteer collective does not; the intermediaries serve both, read the same lists, and price the same risk. Silence about the small case is information about the large one. A company that watched Rome, The Hague and Brussels say nothing while an association legal in Italy lost its bank account learned something about what cover would be on offer if it kept serving the Court. (Vetinari: The market has no opinions of its own. It merely listens, very carefully, to everybody else’s silence.)
A short grammar of saying nothing
Laid side by side, the responses sort into a few kinds, and the kinds may be more useful than the verdicts.
There is absolute silence: no word at all, from any government or EU institution, on the collective’s designation. That held in all three places.
There is speech without a subject: support for the Court, threats deplored, attempts to undermine condemned, and the party doing the threatening left unnamed. That was The Hague at the podium and much of Brussels. Naming has a cost and anonymity has none, so the unnamed version costs the speaker nothing and offers the listener nothing to point to. (Vetinari: Naming is an act. Deploring is merely weather.)
There is speech without an instrument: the toolbox unopened, the horse remedy prepared, the statute under examination with the member states. That was Brussels throughout and The Hague since September. It differs from silence in that it is audible, and resembles it in that nothing changes for the compliance officer at the end of the chain.
There is silence about part of an answer already given: the UIF sentence, and the Digital Services Act’s ban on general monitoring. In both, the state or the Union had already written down part of what the bank and the provider needed to hear, and declined to say it in a voice that could be quoted back.
And there is the response that is not silence at all: action in the direction of the list. A complaint to a prosecutor, an interpellanza in the Camera, a conflict-of-interest review in Brussels, an under-secretary at a ministerial in Washington. Among governments, governing parties and EU institutions, the only moves on the collective found in any of the three places ran this way.
Behind all of them sits an asymmetry. Protection, where it appeared, went to the target with international standing. A court with 125 states parties and a building in The Hague received statements from heads of government, a prepared instrument and a ministerial visit from Germany’s foreign minister. A volunteer collective with no spokesperson and no leaders received questions from opposition members and a complaint from Fratelli d’Italia politicians. That ordering is unsurprising. It is also the ordering an adversary choosing targets would count on: start where nobody will speak, and let the intermediaries learn the lesson in the cheap case before it is applied to the expensive one. De Jonge described it from the receiving end: the Americans, he told NRC, are testing the temperature of the water, watching how Italy, the banks and the Commission react, and he sees that they do not.
People without podiums
The people who spoke most plainly about the consequences were mostly outside the institutions that could change them.
In the Netherlands, PublicSpaces sent a letter to the House and the cabinet on 17 September, co-signed by thirty-seven organisations including ISOC NL, Bits of Freedom, Freedom Internet and Waag Futurelab, with five demands; the fifth was to secure digital and financial services for the Court. ISOC NL said it would look into the decision of the .org registry, which ISOC itself founded. On 1 October the House’s committee on digital affairs asked the cabinet to respond to the letter. No deadline was set.
In Italy, on the same day, fifteen organisations, Banca Etica among them alongside ACLI, ARCI, Legacoop, Oxfam and the European federation of ethical banks, wrote to the Commission and the Italian government asking for help for those sanctioned, diplomatic action, use of the anti-coercion instrument, a rapid reform of the blocking regulation and its annex, and independent European digital and financial infrastructure. Their letter names the Court’s judges, Albanese and the collective together, which none of the institutions they wrote to has done.
The bank that closed the account is a signatory. That is not hypocrisy so much as a precise statement of its position: an intermediary that did what its exposure to secondary sanctions told it to, and then asked publicly for someone with more standing to change the price it was facing. It is the clearest evidence here that the second number in the compliance arithmetic is set from outside the bank. (Vetinari: Few things are as eloquent as an institution asking, in public, to be ordered to do what it would rather have done.)
And there were those who simply did the work. The Court left Microsoft and moved its insurance. Some independent practices took the list as a threat event and redrew their own stacks against it; one such exercise, Taking back the stack, is published in full, down to which recovery address loops back on which registrar. The December 2025 letter offered the Court knowledge and expertise for its digital independence. By then the Court had already chosen its software.
If Vetinari were in charge
Lord Vetinari, handed the eurozone’s governments and the Commission for a week, would issue no statement. Statements, in his experience, are what one issues having decided to do nothing else. He would issue instruments, most of which already exist, and he would start with the cheapest.
He would put the orders in the annex. The blocking statute bites only on the laws specified in its annex, and the Commission may add to that annex by delegated act. The order written for the Court would go in first. The collective’s order is harder, because Executive Order 13224 also lists groups the Union lists itself, and the annex takes laws, not names. He would amend the regulation so that it can take names. (Vetinari: A law forbidding obedience to another law is only as wide as its list. Lists can be lengthened. That is the great thing about them.)
He would pay the bill in advance. Article 6 of the same regulation already lets an EU operator recover its damages from whoever caused them. He would add a fund, so that a bank keeping a customer who is lawful in the Union is compensated by its own side, promptly, instead of by the other side, eventually. (Vetinari: Courage is much more common in banks that have been told who is paying for it.)
He would read the anti-coercion regulation aloud, to the people who wrote it. It covers measures a third country applies “in order to prevent or obtain the cessation, modification or adoption of a particular act by the Union or a Member State”, and he would read sanctions on a court, followed by a call to leave it, as exactly that. The regulation describes itself as a last resort. He has already said what he thinks of last resorts.
He would widen the principle in Jenec. The right to a basic account, with a foreign listing as one factor among others, protects consumers. An amendment to the Payment Accounts Directive could extend it to associations, so that the law is clear about everybody.
He would shrink the second number from the other end. Gabrielli named the means himself: payment circuits and card networks of the Union’s own, the digital euro among them, so that what a bank stands to lose if Washington cuts it off is smaller than what it loses by abandoning a lawful customer.
He would expect to be tested, and soon. The Union has been here before. In 2018 the Commission added the renewed American sanctions on Iran to the annex, and the Parliament’s research service reports the expert verdict: the statute proved ineffective, and INSTEX, the payment channel European states set up beside it, was never widely used. The first European bank punished for keeping a lawful customer would settle whether any of this was real, so the fund would pay before the bank’s lawyers had finished reading the letter. An instrument announced and not backed would invite exactly that test, and fail it in public. (Vetinari: A threat that has been tried and found to be paper is worse than none. One that has never been tried is at least a rumour.)
Only then would he say something. With the instruments in place, a statement would cost nothing and, for once, mean something. (Vetinari: Words are an excellent thing to have after the event. They are much less use instead of it.)