where prosecutors have the right to discontinue proceedings if it is in the interests of justice to do so. By seemingly cornering Mr Netanyahu, the ICC gives him no other choice than to double down.
Meanwhile, the next American administration may well impose sanctions against the ICC as a result of the warrants, which would cripple its operations, so that the warrants’ supporters may only achieve a Pyrrhic victory. As Professor Richard Ekins KC of the University of Oxford writes, the lawfare against Israel only damages the credibility of the institutions that engage in it.
From that Richard Ekins October article:
In late December 2023, South Africa began proceedings in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging that Israel had committed and was committing genocide against the Palestinians.
This was an extraordinary allegation to make in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October atrocities, when Israel was using force in self-defence to attempt to rescue hostages and to degrade Hamas’s capacity to commit further acts of mass murder, rape, and hostage-taking….
The political deployment of legal processes stepped up in May, when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants against the Prime Minister and Defence Minister of Israel, as well as against Hamas commanders.
This was a very ill-judged decision on the part of the prosecutor, implying an equivalence between terrorists who had openly committed mass murder and the leaders of a democratic state using force in self-defence against them.
It remains to be seen whether the ICC will issue arrest warrants. [They have now! – MH] What is clear is that in seeking these arrest warrants the prosecutor adopted an unfair process and ignored the clear limits on the ICC’s jurisdiction, which does not extend to Israeli citizens.
Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, and Palestine, which is not a state, cannot cede criminal jurisdiction over Israelis to the ICC, not least since in agreeing the Oslo Accords it disavowed any such jurisdiction.
The prosecutor’s many failings were spelled out by an expert panel of lawyers meeting at Policy Exchange last month. The failings include the prosecutor’s apparent misunderstanding of the Law of Armed Conflict and his indifference to the fundamental principle of complementarity, which means that the ICC only has a role when domestic legal remedies are effectively unavailable.
As we now know, South Africa received a massive financial lifeline from Iran and Qatar – two regimes notorious for their hostility toward Israel and support for Hamas – just after filing their case against the Jewish state.
Meanwhile these international organisations continue in their particular targeting of Israel, while ignoring much greater injustices elsewhere….
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