French President Emmanuel Macron has urged his US counterpart Donald Trump to lift “unjustly imposed sanctions” against several European citizens – including former European commissioner Thierry Breton and judge Nicolas Guillou, French media reported Sunday.
“I wish to personally draw your attention to the sanctions imposed by the United States against several European citizens, including two French nationals, Nicolas Guillou, a judge at the International Criminal Court, and Thierry Breton, a former European commissioner,” the French president wrote in a letter to Donald Trump, according to La Tribune Dimanche newspaper.
“I ask you to reconsider these decisions by your administration and to lift the sanctions unjustly imposed on Nicolas Guillou and Thierry Breton,” he added.
The sanctions also apply three other French individuals working for non-governmental organisations that flag online disinformation and hate speech.
Announcing the sanctions in December the State Department said: "These radical activists and weaponised NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states – in each case targeting American speakers and American companies."
The EU said "strongly condemned" the sanctions.
EU crackdown on Big Tech comes into effect with changes for users
'Erroneous assesments'
Former EU commissioner Thierry Breton is an architect of the EU’s Digital Services Act and has been at the forefront of efforts to regulate technology platforms, which Washington views as an infringement of freedom of expression.
The State Department accuses him of detrimental "censorship” to American interests. He's been barred from entering the United States since December 2025.
“The sanctions adopted against Thierry Breton undermine European regulatory autonomy and are moreover based on erroneous assessments," Macron said in the letter. "European digital regulation has no extraterritorial scope and applies, without discrimination, within European territory to all companies concerned."
Thierry Breton: France's bulldozer at the EU crashes out
Judicial independence 'undermined'
Judge Nicolas Guillou was sanctioned by Washington in August 2025, along with other ICC magistrates, over his involvement in proceedings relating to an arrest warrant targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Also barred from entering the United States, his Visa card – an American service – was withdrawn by his bank in France. He is also unable to use a range of American digital services, from Airbnb to Amazon.
Israel urges ICC to drop arrest warrants against PM
“The sanctions adopted against Nicolas Guillou undermine the principle of judicial independence and the mandate of the ICC,” Macron wrote.
“I am Breton and I can hold out for a very long time” without a Visa card or American digital services, Guillou said on Tuesday in Brussels, where he had travelled to call for the EU to wake up to banking and digital sovereignty issues.
“But I will not hold out if nothing happens,” he warned.
Another one of the five subject to the US visa ban is British tech campaigner Imran Ahmed, the head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) – a nonprofit watchdog that researches the harmful effects of online disinformation..
In January he described the ban as "punishment" and said Washington's actions amounted to "tyrannical behaviour".
Ahmed, a critic of billionaire Elon Musk, holds US permanent residency. He has filed a lawsuit against Trump's administration, calling the ban an "unconstitutional" attempt to expel a permanent American resident,
(with newswires)
