The International Criminal Court (ICC) is ditching Microsoft Office for a European software alternative amid mounting fears about being reliant on US technology.
The ICC will switch from Microsoft’s productivity wares to openDesk, an open source office and collaboration suite provided by the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of the Interior.
The ICC confirmed the migration The Register, but a spokesperson declined to comment further.
The move follows heightened European unease about relying on American tech giants – particularly as the Trump administration has wielded punitive measures against perceived adversaries.
President Trump signed an executive order in February to sanction ICC officials over arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu connected to alleged war crimes in Gaza.
ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email account. Microsoft President Brad Smith denied the company had done this, telling reporters “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
While concerns over US tech might be growing, efforts to find alternatives to Microsoft isn’t new. The German city of Munich famously decided to go open source many years ago, adopting Linux on its PCs and servers and LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office, although it reverted to Windows in 2020.
More recently, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein last year went public on a project to dump Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice and completed the migration of 40,000 accounts this month.
Existing concerns about over-reliance on US tech services intensified after the latest outages at AWS and Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft’s admission it cannot guarantee European data sovereignty under the US Cloud Act — which allows Washington access to data held by American companies regardless of location.
The Register asked ZenDiS for comment and if it was willing to disclose the value of the ICC deal.
A spokesperson at Microsoft told us: “We value our relationship with the ICC as a customer and are convinced that nothing impedes our ability to continue providing services to the ICC in the future.” ®
