ICC replacing Microsoft workplace software with OpenDesk

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is switching from Microsoft’s Office Suite to the German office software, OpenDesk.

It all started back in February, when United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order to sanction ICC officials over arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu connected to war crimes in Gaza.

In May, ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan lost access to his Microsoft email account. A connection between President Trump’s executive order and the loss of access to his email account was quickly made. To be less dependent on American tech companies, Khan made the switch from Outlook to Proton Mail.

Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft, denied that his company was involved in the matter.

“At no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC,” he said in a statement.

According to the German news outlet Handelsblatt, the International Criminal Court is replacing Microsoft’s software with an open-source alternative because the Trump Administration is said to be planning to impose additional measures against the ICC.

Instead of using Microsoft’s Office software, the ICC would switch 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.

A spokesperson for the ICC confirmed the migration to The Register but declined to comment further.

Following this incident, concerns about increasing dependence on American technology and the loss of Europe’s digital sovereignty were raised.

Can we, or should we, trust American tech companies with our data? In fact, shouldn’t we opt for European alternatives to have greater control over our digital infrastructure and data, and protect our digital sovereignty?

For these reasons, Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein region recently decided to make the transition to open-source software. The same goes for Spanish regions Andalusia and Valencia.

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Back in June, Danish Minister of Digitization, Caroline Stage, announced that her department wants to completely phase out Microsoft’s services. The Minister planned to remove Microsoft’s operating system from half of the employees’ computers and replace it with Linux. Microsoft’s Office 365 was swapped for open-source software called LibreOffice.

In addition, the European Commission is in advanced negotiations with French cloud service provider OVHcloud to transition its cloud services away from Microsoft.

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