THE HAGUE — The European Commission should act “as soon as possible” to give clear guidance on U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court, its top administrative official told POLITICO in an interview.

Osvaldo Zavala Giler, who oversees the day-to-day functioning of the Hague-based court as the institution’s registrar, said his job became “preparing for sanctions” as the White House imposed an escalating regime of restrictions against it.

The Trump administration targeted prosecutors and judges from the court first in February 2025 before announcing blanket sanctions on Oct. 9 this year. The EU has repeatedly backed the Court against Washington, but it has resisted calls to activate a mechanism that would forbid firms from complying with U.S. laws.

That has agonized senior figures in The Hague. Zavala Giler said the Commission’s “lack of clarity” left private companies and NGOs in the dark over whether they should comply with sanctions decided by Washington — and what risks they face if they don’t.

Zavala Giler’s call to the Commission adds to pressure from EU lawmakers for a swift response after the Oct. 9 announcement. Kallas told the European Parliament on Tuesday that Brussels would use the next few months “to open dialogue” on the issue. The new sanctions are set to take effect in April next year.

“What I would hope is that the space for dialogue is not interpreted as a space for waiting to protect the court,” Zavala Giler said, who spoke from his glass office on the eve of a visit to the Court’s headquarters by the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.

Damocles sword

Anticipating sweeping sanctions, the Court spent six months abandoning U.S. tech providers and moving to an open-source software environment, and 20 months to make its financial transactions dollar-proof. That move has been a huge undertaking for Zavala Giler’s team, he said.

The Court initially deepened its reliance on U.S. technology after it was hit by a massive cyber attack in 2023, but what seemed a solution at that time became a problem in the face of sanctions. Even though the current regime includes a carveout for telecommunications, there is no guarantee it will remain the case.

“It becomes a sort of Damocles sword on top of our head that could be revoked at any time,” Zavala Giler said. “I cannot count on U.S. tech companies anymore.”

U.S. platforms operate as entire ecosystems, offering all-encompassing solutions under a single contract. To do without them, “you need to start creating your own architecture and systems that need to speak to each other,” the registrar said.

Financial autonomy was equally hard to achieve. The Court mapped all its suppliers’ transactions to ensure there was no U.S. nexus, meaning that no U.S. person, bank or currency is involved in a payment. “We made all of our staff members have European bank accounts. It was a very detailed process that we had to do, person by person, company by company, making sure that the contracts were in euros,” the registrar said.

The Court also went from working with tens of banks to only “a few,” since only a handful of institutions are comfortable with dollar-proof payments.

Chilling effect

That situation is likely to worsen without clear guidance from EU countries and the Commission. As Zavala Giler put it, “if the International Criminal Court cannot transact in Europe, in euros within the SEPA zone with no U.S. nexus, then there is a bigger question about European financial sovereignty.”

The Court has long called the EU to use a legislative shield — known as blocking statute — that would forbid EU firms from complying with U.S. sanctions. The request was backed by dozens of lawmakers at the European Parliament, which incidentally awarded the court its human rights Sakharov Prize on Thursday.

The blocking statute “becomes an instrument to reassert the minimum space that should not be affected by unilateral extraterritorial sanctions … that minimum space should be, at the very least, the eurozone,” Zavala Giler said. Even without it, the court needs “the reassurances that, at least within the eurozone, [it] can continue to operate,” he added.

So far, however, the Commission has taken a cautious approach, choosing dialogue with the U.S. as a way of “buying time,” as a EU diplomat put it to POLITICO.

In a balancing act, EU heads of state and government backed Brussels’ diplomatic effort at their summit last week, while also committing to do whatever is needed to support the Court.

“I hope that now that the European Council has opened this door, the Commission will feel more comfortable in taking an extra step. And at the very least, providing some kind of clear guidance,” Zavala Giler said.

As an intermediate step, the registrar suggested the use of “comfort letters” reassuring firms that they should not comply with the U.S. measures.

Zavala Giler stressed that sanctions were not only a matter to address for banks and tech operators, as the current uncertainty has already affected NGOs working with the Court. NGOs play a critical role in supporting the work of the Court, for instance “to provide reparations for victims in Uganda” or “to assist the work of the court in providing assistance to victims in Ukraine.”

“This has created an enormous chilling effect,” he said. “They don’t know if they have the legal protections or not, to continue supporting the work of the court.”

The registrar’s office overlooks the moat circling the court’s six towers across the compound’s 46,000 square meters. In one of these buildings, the trial of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte over alleged crimes against humanity is due to begin next month. Reporters who will cover the proceeds won’t be allowed to use their phones — only paper and pen.

It is Zavala Giler’s job to oversee this huge institution, which relies on secure communications, cross-border funding for investigations and the contribution of many NGOs.

“This court has for victims the promise of the never again,” Zavala Giler said.

LONDON — When Prime Minister Andy Burnham arrived a few minutes late to a meeting with regional mayors on Thursday, his Cabinet ally Angela Rayner had a name for it. She joked they were on “Andy Time.”

The rest of Britain is beginning to learn what that feels like.

Burnham entered 10 Downing Street three months ago promising a “new economic model.” However, the prime minister’s first budget next Wednesday will ask voters to wait a bit longer for it.

John Healey, Burnham’s top finance minister, is expected to announce cuts to business regulation, new steps to move power out of Whitehall and targeted cost-of-living help as energy bills surge due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

But while London’s banking sector is resigned to a tax rise, Healey is broadly not expected to completely overhaul tax regimes that many in Burnham’s center-left Labour Party have long seen as unfair. These include business rates, which treat high street shops more harshly than out-of-town delivery warehouses; capital gains tax, which charges less on income from assets than from work; and council tax on homes, which is based on valuations from 1991. 

Healey and his allies are already rolling out a pitch for lower-key changes to tax and spending than his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, insisting budgets are about more than their bottom-line “scorecard.” They point instead to thinning the “sludge” of business bureaucracy and helping “bloody-minded” entrepreneurs.

The reason behind this is about much more than war dragging on the British economy and keeping inflation high. Many radical reforms just aren’t ready yet. 

Next Wednesday will mark just 100 days since Burnham took office, after a whirlwind special election that ended the Greater Manchester mayor’s decade-long absence from parliament.

Burnham’s much-touted “10-year plan” to rewire Britain’s public realm is far from finished; its publication date is edging closer to Christmas. And many granular details of his plan for reform — including higher defense spending, welfare reforms and ownership of the water sector — will only come at a multi-year spending review some time in 2027. Healey is still trying to decide when that will happen.

POLITICO spoke to 22 current and former government officials, MPs and people who speak regularly to Downing Street to map out Burnham and Healey’s strategy, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly. 

Several offered the view that Healey’s budget was designed to act as a stepping stone toward the 10-year plan and spending review, while not spooking the bond markets — which Burnham complained Britain was “in hock to” last year. That is despite Britain inching closer to a general election that the prime minister must call by summer 2029.

“They want it to be a non-event,” one person who speaks regularly to both 10 and 11 Downing Street said of the budget. 

Expectation management

This narrative has already left Healey’s allies bristling.

People are “accusing us of not making decisions and kicking the can down the road when actually this budget is incredibly difficult,” said one government official. This person added: “This is the first budget of this country that will have come to the House of Commons for scrutiny while the war in the Middle East is raging and an illegal invasion of Ukraine continues by Russia. The idea that this is by any means small is quite difficult to stomach.”

A second U.K. government official argued the budget would be “as ambitious as possible within the political context.” But a third government official said they believed the budget would be more “steady as she goes” than finished solutions to Britain’s problems.

Ruth Curtice, a former Treasury official who is now chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, a think tank focused on living standards, added: “In some ways it’s quite surprising to have such a small budget, given we have a new prime minister and chancellor and quite a lot has happened in the world since the last one.”

The opposition Conservative Party is preparing to seize on this “deferral budget” theme. Tory strategists are ready to paint it as a cowardly act from an administration they claim prefers sweeping vision to hard decisions. “Why act tomorrow when you can act today?” said one shadow cabinet minister. “Have some balls!”

Cameron Brown, a former Tory special adviser in the Treasury, was more sympathetic. “There’s no need to crystallize any kind of savings or cuts now,” when the spending review is looming anyway, he argued. Brown predicted a “tight and concise” but “intellectually coherent” package: “[Healey] will have some buffer at the end, a nice little cost of living package, Labour MPs will be happy, he’ll target the bad people — gamblers and banks — and he’ll push things down the road a bit.”

A Labour official voiced concern that a cautious budget could lose the goodwill Burnham has built with the public — as happened to his predecessor Keir Starmer, who promised “change” in his 2024 manifesto.

And Reeves’ former Political Secretary Matt Pound urged “caution” on deferring too many decisions to the 2027 spending review. “The truth is that they could end up putting a monumental amount of pressure on that spending review,” he told POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast in an interview released Friday. “There are already a lot of pressures they will need to fund.”

Hard to get

“Energy” will be the key thread linking Healey’s messages for the budget, a fourth U.K. government official said — from “breathing space” help with bills to building a more resilient infrastructure network. 

There will also be a “fiscal devolution roadmap” on budget day, setting out terms of how regional mayors can get more power and money and drawn up partly by Burnham’s new Manchester outpost, No. 10 North. Legislation to let them impose tourist taxes will be published in the coming weeks. And officials have talked behind the scenes about procurement and boosting Britain’s heavy industries; the budget needs to find almost £5 billion to plug a hole in a defense investment plan unveiled under Starmer.

Targeted cost-of-living measures appear likely to include scrapping “standing charges” on domestic gas bills, which cost the average household just over £100 a year. Burnham said Wednesday that he had asked Healey to look at the issue — though any help could be eclipsed by a predicted £276 rise in domestic bills this January.

The other message will be that the Treasury can do big, consequential things without raising taxes. Healey will make “a political argument that actually there are other types of budgets that you can have,” said the first government official quoted above, “busting through some of that sludge and ripping up a lot of that red tape.” Cash-strapped chancellors have reached for regulatory reform before, with mixed success.

MPs are looking closely at cost-of-living support. One backbencher in an affluent seat said any help had to be significant, because even their well-off constituents were struggling to take the holidays they wanted. Defense, by contrast, barely comes up on the doorstep: “There are hardly any votes in it, but it’s just something we have to do.”

There has been heavy engagement with Labour MPs, whose detachment from No. 10 helped force Starmer out in July. Treasury ministers Torsten Bell and James Murray are among those engaging while Chief Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds handles tricky negotiations with Cabinet ministers, alongside No. 10 chief of staff James Purnell.

Healey has negotiated with Cabinet ministers and spoken to union leaders, banks and MPs — though not lobbyists. “No one can get to Healey,” said one. “It’s very smart. Let him do his job.”

Markets will look at the “headroom” — a snapshot of the buffer between Healey’s five-year plans and his self-imposed fiscal rules. The fourth official quoted above said Treasury officials have considered having only a small “headroom” buffer compared to the £21.7 billion left by Reeves, as it could be increased in future years. 

Reeves’ former political secretary, Pound, warned against this, telling Westminster Insider: “If the headroom is so low that it’s clear that they can’t clear the defense investment plan, for example, or the wider defense pressures, then I think that that could then start to have a bit of a knock-on effect that would be quite negative.”

However, headroom is merely a snapshot, often out of date by the time it is published. It is likely to be buffeted further by any events in the Middle East arising from the U.S. midterm results on Nov. 3.

And as with all budget briefings, some opposition politicians believe there is an element of expectation management. Conservatives suspect that headroom will come out higher than predicted — which Healey can paint as a victory.

Time is ticking

Then it’ll all be over — and Westminster will immediately start preparing for the next step.

A date was never confirmed for Burnham’s 10-year plan (beyond the latter part of 2026), but some officials believe it has already slipped slightly from the original intention. 

Downing Street and Cabinet Office officials remain determined to publish it in December, though some in Whitehall worry it might be delayed. “Knowing the things on the horizon and how big they are, I genuinely don’t see how you could make space for it,” said one official in another department.

While some Cabinet Office civil servants were first tasked to work on the plan in August, others only joined the team this month as it has grown, according to one person with knowledge of the staffing. Burnham’s ally Louise Haigh, the first secretary of state, is leading three “task forces” ahead of the plan on the cost of living, public control of utilities and the renewal of run-down high streets.

The 10-year plan won’t have all the answers, though. POLITICO reported this week that while it will contain a high-level vision, priorities and principles for the water industry’s future, much of the granular detail of how future ownership models will work is expected in the 2027 spending review. 

One Labour figure who has spoken to the government about the water industry said they believed ministers will choose “different horses for different courses” — an array of ownership models for various firms depending on how stricken they are. A second Labour figure talking to the government said: “You can’t do this in two years.”

The Labour official quoted earlier in this story said they feared the 10-year plan would be a let-down. “These big plans governments are always throwing forward to have a habit of turning out quite thin,” this person said. “At which point we all realize there was never a big plan all along.”

There are other plans to come, including an imminent plan to reform the welfare system by the former Labour Cabinet minister Alan Milburn, and a white paper in December that is due to set out a timetable, legislation and borders for plans to move more power outside Whitehall.

Devolution is one area where Burnham has moved quickly, pleasing many regional mayors. But some officials in the union movement fear that Burnham’s initial focus on devolution risks taking up bandwidth that could have been spent on other issues. A fifth government official added that they were worried all the conversations between different public bodies could crowd out the push for growth. They said: “I sit on Teams calls that are 30 people, all from different arms of the state. Sometimes I think — ‘You do know none of us are making this money?’”

‘Rubber hits the road’

Then there is the 2027 spending review. 

It will set out how the state allocates money across its arms for the next three to five years — turning these plans and the difficult trade-offs they require into reality.

The Treasury has previously confirmed it will set out the entire pathway to lift U.K. defense spending from 2.6% of GDP this year to 3.5% by 2035. It is also likely to address questions about Burnham’s pledge to create a state-funded national service for social care, funded by reducing the rise in the state pension.

There will be months of to-and-fro between Whitehall departments and a Treasury looking for cuts, efficiency savings or both to balance the books.

“The spending review is when the rubber hits the road,” said the fifth government official quoted above. “It’s already beginning. Departments are beginning to work out sacrificial lambs to offer up.”

Three people with knowledge of the conversations said Healey still hasn’t decided when in 2027 he wants to hold the spending review, though it is broadly expected no earlier than the summer. He has been privately musing with allies about the options.

Curtice said Healey’s options are essentially to hold a small fiscal event followed by a spending review next summer, or to hold a spending review with an annual budget simultaneously in fall 2027.

She added: “The big question we’ve posed for this budget — that we’re not necessarily expecting an answer to — is what is the spending total for the spending review that we know needs to come next year? Until we know the answer to that question, we don’t really know whether we can believe the path of tax and borrowing that is set out in the budget.”

Senior Conservatives argue the spending review will be so difficult that Burnham could call a snap election before it is due. He has insisted he will only force it in 2029.

Until then, much of the spending review work will fall to Reynolds. Her predecessor Darren Jones argued the existence of the 10-year plan and spending review meant it would be sensible for next week’s budget to be a little low-octane.

“The prime minister’s been clear that the 10-year plan is going to be the political strategy for the government,” Jones told POLITICO. “So I think it makes sense to do all of your public spending decisions after the publication of the 10-year plan. It would be odd if this October’s budget tried to deal with all the big trade-offs on defense, mayoral budgets, or more ownership of public utilities.

“So I think in many ways, actually the 10-year plan is more interesting this autumn in terms of the political strategy of the government. 

“And then 2027 will be the year in which ministers will have to start thinking about how to implement that strategy operationally, including in public spending decisions.”

Much of that will fall to Burnham himself.

Crowdsourcing

Rayner’s joke about “Andy Time” was not without cause.

Unlike Starmer, Burnham gets into the weeds of an issue even if it derails his schedule. The prime minister chews things over with colleagues so much that some have joked they could just remove his Downing Street desk, said the third government official quoted above. By contrast, Starmer used to retreat to No. 10’s first-floor study to read away from the hubbub.

Burnham’s approach can lead to Downing Street making decisions late in the day. One former No. 10 official said: “A Prime Minister needs to do 80 things in a day and if that goes to 60, then you end up massively behind.”

The flipside is that ministers and officials know what their leader actually wants from them — even if they are left to work out the detail.

“It’s like we’ve woken up from a political coma,” one backbench MP enthused. “I know what the prime minister thinks,” added the third government official quoted above.

Aides used to complain that Starmer, by contrast, tried to be efficient but would end meetings without setting a clear political direction. “Keir was always a stickler for time, even if the issue wasn’t resolved,” as one former colleague put it.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, suggested this week that Burnham was failing to flesh out the detail behind his vision. “Talking about it is not making a decision,” she said of social care reform at prime minister’s questions. Burnham was visibly frustrated—insisting he was making the long-term decisions other politicians duck.

And for the prime minister’s allies and most of his MPs, the vibes remain good. The No. 10 environment is more relaxed and open. Junior ministers, in meetings over bacon sandwiches, feel they can share their views and be heard.

“There’s definitely still a buzz,” said the person who talks regularly to Downing Street, who was quoted earlier in this story. “But you don’t want to spend too much time buzzing while Rome burns. There’s a reality check that I feel is going to come imminently.”

Patrick Baker, Sascha O’Sullivan, Esther Webber and Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.

MADRID — The Spanish government has won a significant victory in a long-running legal dispute with international investors over its decision more than a decade ago to scrap renewable energy subsidies.

This week, a Belgian court overturned a ruling that ordered the Spanish government to pay investors nearly €76 million.

It was a major win for Spain, which has been fighting attempts to freeze its assets around the world from clean energy investors who claim they are owed at least €2 billion in subsidies.

The dispute dates back to 2013, in the middle of the European debt crisis, when cash-strapped Spain, then under a new conservative government, decided to remove subsidies for renewable energy. Investors who had poured money into Spanish renewables said this was a breach, as they had invested on the understanding they would receive the subsidies.

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ruled that Spain must pay the money, but the European Commission has told Spain doing so would constitute unlawful state aid.

The standoff has played out all over the world, with investors attempting to freeze Spanish assets in multiple jurisdictions. In June, U.S. investment fund Blasket Renewable Investments LLC issued subpoenas demanding documents from Adidas, Hilton Hotels, and other entities involved in Spain’s Football World Cup participation to help with its bid to freeze Spanish assets.

In the end, the team went back home with its assets intact, along with the World Cup.

Spain also has cases going on in courts in Australia, Germany and the U.S.

In 2023, a British court ordered an embargo on an international school in London owned by the Spanish state. The Belgian court’s original decision was one of the few examples where investors were successful, and the decision this week to overturn it will set a precedent for other challenges.

The case

Spain’s defense persuaded a Belgian court to lift an embargo imposed in 2025 on state-owned air-navigation company Enaire for €75.76 million, according to documents seen by POLITICO.

The case was also brought by Blasket, which bought the dispute from an investment fund called RREEF. The European Commission intervened in support of Spain.

RREEF, which was originally linked to Deutsche Bank, invested in Spanish wind and solar power under a 2007 regulatory framework that guaranteed subsidies for renewable energy. In 2013, amid the economic crisis, the government of then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, of the conservative People’s Party, cut those subsidies to reduce electricity costs.

International investors turned to arbitration, arguing that the Energy Charter Treaty, an international agreement signed in the 1990s, guaranteed them fair and predictable treatment. The funds sought more than €10 billion in compensation, according to sources at Spain’s Environment Ministry.

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, part of the World Bank, which handled most of the arbitration cases, ruled against Spain, though it reduced the amount sought in many cases. The total awards came to about €2 billion. In its 2019 ruling, the tribunal ordered Spain to pay RREEF €59.6 million, plus interest and costs.

Most of the claims, including RREEF’s, were sold to Blasket, which began seeking to enforce the awards. The funds have searched for Spanish assets that could be seized to satisfy the claims.

Spain says it cannot pay because the European Commission has determined that doing so would constitute unlawful state aid. The funds invested through companies based in Luxembourg, and the EU’s top court ruled that the Energy Charter Treaty did not apply to disputes between EU investors and EU member states; EU law governed instead.

In August 2026, the Commission opened infringement proceedings against Spain over a €23 million payment on an award involving a Japanese company, which was not based in the EU.

On June 17, 2025, Blasket secured a Belgian court order freezing €75.76 million belonging to Enaire, the state-owned company that manages air navigation in Spain. Enaire receives payments from Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based European organization that collects air-navigation charges from airlines and distributes the proceeds.

That arrangement made it possible to freeze Spanish public funds in Belgium. After a legal dispute, Spain deposited €75,759,538 on May 4, 2026.

The freeze was a high-profile win for investors pursuing Spain. They have secured other attachments in the United Kingdom and are engaged in ongoing U.S. court disputes over enforcement of the awards.

Spain appealed, and the European Commission intervened on its behalf. The Belgian state also argued that the attachment breached EU law. The Belgian court has now ruled in Spain’s favor, lifting the freeze and ordering Blasket to pay the legal costs.

That leaves Spain in a stronger position against international investors seeking to enforce the awards — at least within the EU.