The International Criminal Court (ICC) is to replace Microsoft software with the openDesk software offered by German company Zendis.
The contracts are about to be signed, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported.
ZenDis – an acronym for Centre for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration in German – is fully owned by the German State. It was founded in December 2022 to consult German public institutions and provide IT solutions for public bodies. The aim was to make Germany less dependent on foreign software and information technology.
The ICC will use ZenDis’ openDesk programme package, which offers word processing, email, chat, video conferences and other services. It was first presented to the public in 2024. The software is open source and aimed at public institutions.
Given the ICC has 1,800 workstations, the move is seen more as symbolic, Handelsblatt said. The decision was taken to make the ICC more independent of US technology.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly spoken out against the ICC, which he has accused of anti-Israel bias and partisanship.
In August 2025, the US Government announced sanctions against two ICC prosecutors and two judges. US Foreign Secretary Marco Rubio called the ICC “a national security threat”.
The US had sanctioned four other ICC judges in June 2025 and its chief prosecutor Karim Khan in February.
“Given the circumstances, we must reduce dependencies and strengthen the technological autonomy of the Court – even if this is expensive, inefficient and inconvenient in the short term,” said ICC IT manager Osvaldo Zavala Giler, according to Handelsblatt.
The ICC is not the first public institution to ditch Microsoft products.
In April, the German Army announced it had signed a seven-year-contract with ZenDis for openDesk.
In September, the Austrian Army said it was replacing Microsoft Office with the Germany-based open-source LibreOffice programme suite.
The ICC was established in 2002 and is headquartered in The Hague in the Netherlands.
It gained notoriety in May 2024 when its chief prosecutor Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes during the war in Gaza.
The US has never signed the ICC’s founding document and is not a member State of the court.
