US presidency: Trump administration withdraws from dozens of international organisations in unprecedented move

Chloé Farand

US President Donald Trump addresses the UN General Assembly, 23 September 2025. REUTERS/Mike Segar

In January, President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum pulling the US out of 66 international organisations and instruments, including 31 UN entities. His administration views the organisations as being ‘wasteful, ineffective, and harmful’ to America’s ‘sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity’, while commentators say the exit of the US is a blow to decades of international norm setting, with implications for the operations of bodies tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges by promoting peacebuilding, human rights, the rule of law and climate action.

‘The Trump administration’s conception of international law and international relations is very different than past administrations,’ says Michael Showalter, an officer of the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee.

Some previous US administrations have argued that laws and norms shouldn’t be dictated by supranational entities and have exited international treaties they didn’t support. Notably, President George W Bush withdrew the US signature to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court. And President Trump had already pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO and the Paris Agreement.

But this latest move goes far beyond anything a US president has done before.

‘Shorter term, there is real alarm in the legal community about a general withdrawal from international institutions and instruments,’ says Edie Hofmeister, a Member of the IBA Business Human Rights Committee Advisory Board. ‘US withdrawal may signal to governments with poor human rights records that protecting these rights is optional,’ she says, adding that the withdrawal of American funding will have the greatest impact in low-income and fragile states.

There’s general agreement among legal scholars that a future US president could rejoin most, if not all, of the organisations and treaties that Trump has left. But as successive US administrations oscillate between leaving and rejoining global organisations, they risk further eroding trust in America’s ability to lead over the long-term, says Hofmeister, who’s an independent director based in California.

Among the organisations the US is leaving are bodies working to strengthen counterterrorism and uphold the rights of children, women and victims of conflict and sexual violence. The list also includes organisations working to promote the rule of law, such as the International Law Commission. This organisation comprises a rotating group of experts established by the UN General Assembly in 1947 to help develop and codify international law.

Most organisations will continue to operate without the US. But for many cash-strapped entities, the extent of what they’ll be able to do will depend on the willingness of the international community to fill the gap left by Washington’s retreat. ‘The US have sent a clear signal [as to] which issues they consider relevant for international cooperation – and which ones they do not,’ says Markus Beham, Co-Chair of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee.

At the same time, holding eulogies to international law and the UN as a whole is ‘surely premature if not overall ill-founded,’ says Beham, who is Chair of Public International and European Law at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt. ‘After all, the US still continues to operate within its framework wherever they find the channels to operate efficiently for conducting their international affairs.’

One area where the Trump administration appears to have little intention of working with international partners is in respect of addressing the climate crisis. President Trump has previously called climate change ‘a hoax’ and has overseen a sweeping rollback of related federal policies, including the revocation in January of the 2009 ‘endangerment finding’, which held that a range of greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and the environment and therefore should be regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The finding has thus been used as a foundation for federal efforts to tackle emissions, such as those produced by vehicles.

President Trump has said that repealing the finding will mean a decrease in costs for US car manufacturers. Environmental advocates have meanwhile warned that the repeal could disrupt the energy transition and climate investment over the long-term.

The January memorandum pulls the US out of around a dozen organisations advancing cooperation on addressing global warming, biodiversity loss and energy. This includes the UNFCCC, the international treaty that underpins cooperation on climate action. The Trump administration’s rationale is that membership ‘no longer [serves] American interests’ and ‘wastes’ US taxpayer money.

The move has sparked ‘a very interesting’ question about the legality of using a memorandum to pull the US out of the treaty since its ratification was approved by a two-third majority in the Senate, says Showalter, who’s a partner at ArentFox Schiff, based in Chicago and New York.

The US Constitution makes no reference to exiting international bodies and agreements and the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the issue. Some legal scholars argue that the President has no general unilateral power to do so. Others suggest that, in practice, the President’s ability to withdraw from treaties without the approval of Congress has been accepted. Other scholars meanwhile have looked at the question of whether a future administration would be able to rejoin the UNFCCC without the need to seek new consent from Congress.

‘The US was never the most reliable country in terms of climate governance,’ says Showalter. But at the sub-national level, states such as Michigan are taking ‘very aggressive action’ by suing fossil fuel companies on climate grounds, he says.

America’s long-term and structural retreat from the climate regime will also reverberate at the international level. ‘Withdrawal may force the world towards a fragmented landscape of bilateralism and climate clubs,’ says Rajat Jariwal, an officer of the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee. ‘The regime is not expected to collapse, but it will most definitely become less coherent […] and dilute the peer pressure dynamics that drive ambition.’

Freedom of expression: Palestine Action ruling draws line between criminal protest and terrorism

Alice Johnson, IBA Multimedia Journalist

Palestine Action protest in London, 6 September 2025. Indigo Nolan, CC BY 4.0/Flickr.

In February, the High Court of England and Wales found that the UK government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action under the 2000 Terrorism Act was unlawful. The proscription of the direct-action group was highly controversial and led to the arrests of over 2000 people alleged to have expressed support for the organisation.

The government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in 2025 on the basis that it carried out ‘a series of violent attacks against national security targets’, which is estimated to have caused millions of pounds worth of damage, including to the UK premises of Elbit, Israel’s largest arms company. Tactics included breaking into facilities, vandalism and destroying equipment.

The Court ruled that the decision to proscribe, taken by former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and approved by Parliament, was a ‘disproportionate’ interference with freedom of expression and protest rights and that it was not consistent with the government’s own policy on proscription. The Home Office told Global Insight that it is appealing the ruling and ‘will always take the strongest possible action to protect our national security, and our priority remains maintaining the safety and security of our citizens’. The group remains proscribed pending the appeal.

The proscription of Palestine Action placed the group on a list of terrorist organisations including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, despite not being accused of the same levels of extreme violence against civilians associated with those groups. The judges said in the High Court ruling that while under UK terrorism law ‘a very small number of its actions have amounted to terrorist action’, the ‘nature and scale’ of the actions had not reached the level and persistence that would justify terrorist proscription. The judges concluded that most of Palestine Action’s activities could be prosecuted under criminal law.

‘The wider constitutional significance is that the ruling draws a bright line between criminal protest, which the law can and should address in the normal way, and terrorism, which carries exceptional stigma and consequences,’ says Mark Stephens CBE, Co-Chair of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute. Following the action targeting Elbit, authorities have charged more than 20 Palestine Action activists with criminal damage, which carries a maximum ten-year sentence, with some being convicted and others acquitted.

The proscription of Palestine Action triggered mass protests and led to the arrest of more than 2000 people on suspicion of terrorist offences, mostly for simply holding up signs in support of Palestine Action. The judges, while giving little weight to the impact on protestors directly expressing support for the group, held that the interference of the proscription with Article 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights – which protect speech and freedom of association – was ‘very significant’ and recognised that the proscription created a chilling effect on lawful speech and the ability of civil society organisations to campaign against the use of the power to proscribe.

‘The critical danger in this proscription policy action is the effect it has on chilling the democratic space more generally,’ says Ben Saul, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, who intervened in the case to provide expert evidence on international human rights law. ‘As soon as the government starts shutting down large parts of legitimate speech that’s when democracy itself begins to fray at the edges.’

Saul says that the High Court decision brings the UK more closely in line with international treaties, including those on maritime and aviation safety, as well as the Terror Bombings Convention, where property damage is only considered terrorism in very specific circumstances, which usually involves high levels of harm to civilians. ‘In international law generally, there is lots of support for the view that acts that intentionally cause death or serious bodily injury are really the core of what terrorism is,’ he says.

Yasmine Ahmed, the UK Director of Human Rights Watch, says that following the ruling the government should review the definition of terrorism under the UK Terrorism Act to ensure the law cannot be used to silence dissent or protest. ‘The fact that it includes criminal damage and does not qualify that criminal damage in terms of violence against civilians or impact on national security is extremely problematic,’ she says.

Following the ruling, charges against those alleged to have supported Palestine Action have been thrown into doubt. The Chief Magistrate of England and Wales, Paul Golfspring, said that people charged with offences related to Palestine Action would not face court until the appeal is concluded. The Metropolitan Police said officers would stop arresting people who show support for Palestine Action but will continue to gather evidence for potential future prosecutions.

Ahmed says that the judgment is significant as a rare example of a court limiting the discretion of the state regarding national security. ‘Whilst absolutely there is always going to be a margin of appreciation provided to the state in terms of deciding what is appropriate for national security, it is appropriate that the court ensures that those actions don’t infringe on other fundamental rights that are otherwise lawful, particularly when it impacts so many individuals in our society,’ she says.