EU lawmakers urged the bloc’s executive to robustly defend the International Criminal Court against U.S. sanctions in a letter sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday and obtained by POLITICO.

“We formally call for the urgent deployment of all instruments at our disposal to protect the International Criminal Court from the consequences of these sanctions,” reads the letter, signed by 58 MEPs, led by ECON chair and S&D lawmaker Aurore Lalucq and EPP Dutch lawmaker Dirk Gotink.

They ask the Commission boss “to draw a clear line towards the US administration.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to demolish the ICC “brick by brick.” Washington has already sanctioned several judges, including judges from France, Italy and Slovenia, after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

U.S. sanctions announced on Friday risk to cut off the whole ICC from the financial system, which runs on the dollar, and from the majority of tech service providers.

Lawmakers said the sanctions are “an attack by a foreign power on an entity on EU territory, using our own financial system.” They want the Commission to activate a legislative shield known as Blocking Statute, that would prevent EU firms from complying with the U.S. sanctions as soon as a 180-day grace period ends.

After a meeting in Luxembourg, foreign affairs ministers agreed to seek pragmatic solutions to make it possible for EU firms to continue to work with the Court, according to two diplomats. MEPs called for a fiercer reaction.

“The survival of the values the European Union upholds is at stake, as is Europe’s autonomy and credibility in protecting its citizens and entities against foreign sanctions,” their letter reads. “This is about the survival of the Union itself.”

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant rejected furious accusations from the U.K. region’s unionists Monday that he had “bent the knee” to Irish republicans blocking a long-disputed Protestant march.

Bryant told the House of Commons that his decision to ban what had been a legally authorized parade by the Orange Order — a pro-British Protestant brotherhood reviled by many of Northern Ireland’s Catholics — had been taken principally to avoid violence. Thousands led by Sinn Fein, the main Irish republican party, had spent nearly two weeks blocking the Orangemen’s intended path down the Garvaghy Road, the main Catholic district in the town of Portadown, but police kept the two sides apart.  

“The Orange Order obtained a legal right to parade, but … upholding the determination does not come at any cost. Upholding the law also means judiciously preventing serious disorder,” Bryant said in defense of his intervention Friday night.

Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson accused Bryant of bowing to a threat of violence from Irish Republican Army militants who featured prominently within the Garvaghy Road crowd. Most IRA members have observed a cease-fire since 1997 and officially disarmed in 2005, but several small factions still plot occasional bomb and gun attacks.

Robinson said Northern Ireland’s unionists “know that this British government has bent the knee to them.”

But Bryant said his decision to bar the Orangemen — despite a decision last month by the region’s independent Parades Commission to permit a heavily restricted march by 35 Orangemen — had so far kept violence at bay.

“I utterly reject the charge that I have in any way succumbed to mob rule. The truth is, things have actually passed remarkably peacefully,” he said, adding: “I don’t think anybody seriously proposed that the police should drag people off the street.”

He spoke hours after two courts in Northern Ireland tangled with the conflict of rights stirred up by the revival of the Orange marching demands in Portadown, a sectarian dispute that triggered bloodshed and rioting across Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s.

The Court of Appeal, overseen by Northern Ireland’s highest judge, rejected a lawsuit by the Garvaghy Road protesters seeking to challenge the original Parades Commission ruling. Orange supporters said this judgment kept the door open for an eventual parade down Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1997, when police backed by British soldiers forced the parade through with the use of armored vehicles and volleys of plastic bullets.

A separate Belfast High Court hearing gave the go-ahead for Portadown’s Orange lodge to pursue a legal challenge against both Bryant and Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher. That case will be heard starting next Monday.

Boutcher, rejecting unionist calls for him to resign, issued his own lengthy defense of his officers’ management of the Portadown standoff. He appealed to both sides to respect a legal process that could take months to conclude — including potential charges against senior Sinn Féin figures involved in the Garvaghy Road blockade.

The legal fight over whose rights should prevail is fracturing Northern Ireland’s cross-community government, a bitterness on full display Monday night at Stormont, the center of government on a hill overlooking Belfast.

After a three-hour debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly, unionist members voted unanimously to oust the four Sinn Féin ministers from their supposed unity government. Unionists accused all four, led by First Minister Michelle O’Neill, of breaking their ministerial pledge to uphold the law of the land by joining and encouraging the Garvaghy Road protests.

O’Neill accused her accusers on the other side of the chamber of being reactionary bigots.

“It’s no surprise to me that the three unionist parties have signed up to this motion. They have never accepted the reality that an Irish republican is now the first minister, and a woman at that. They have never accepted equality,” she said.

The unionists’ motion of no confidence bore no legal weight because of Stormont’s peculiar power-sharing rules. This would have required Sinn Féin members to join the unionists in voting to punish their own leaders.

In the end, four motions — seeking the expulsion from office for a year of O’Neill, Finance Minister John O’Dowd, Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald and Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins — all failed on virtually identical sectarian tests. While 33 to 34 unionists voted to kick out each one, 35 lawmakers from Sinn Féin and a smaller Irish nationalist party, the SDLP, voted to keep them in office.

O’Neill’s official co-leader of Northern Ireland’s four-party government, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionists, said she understood the law as a barrister — and her government colleague had broken it by leading a “mob” that included well-known figures from multiple IRA factions “threatening violence and disorder.”