In the Telegraph, Natasha Hausdorff gives the International Criminal Court both barrels, condemning its politicised arrest warrants against Israeli leaders as a move that emboldens terror organisations worldwide. Here’s an excerpt:
The cause of international justice was dealt a severe blow on Thursday with arrest warrants issued for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant.
The International Criminal Court took this brazen political move in circumstances where it has no jurisdiction, in breach of its own rules and on the basis of false information.
Jurisdiction is what separates international legal institutions from political ones. The ICC’s jurisdiction is derived from its member states and from other states that accept its jurisdiction over their nationals and their territory. However, Israel did not join the ICC, and the Palestinian Authority is not a state, so neither has delegated any jurisdiction to the ICC.
Further still, the international agreements that created the Palestinian Authority (the Oslo Accords) explicitly said that Israel would have sole criminal jurisdiction over Israelis. So even if the Palestinian Authority could delegate any jurisdiction to the ICC, it had no criminal jurisdiction over Israelis to delegate.
The rules of the ICC have been thrown out of the window. A founding principle of the Court is “complementarity”: the ICC is a complement to national legal systems; it does not replace them. …
Who are the winners of this dastardly enterprise? The internationally proscribed terror group Hamas publicly thanked the Court for its interventions on its behalf. But the message that is sent by this disgraceful development is one of encouragement to terror organisations the world over. It is an unconscionable attack on the inherent right of self-defence that other democratic states may well seek to exercise against similar fundamentalist terrorist organisations in the future.
Worth reading in full.
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