Int’l Criminal Court already treating Israel differently

Int’l Criminal Court already treating Israel differently

When the Palestinian Authority submitted papers to the International Criminal Court for the purpose of seeking war crimes prosecutions of Israel, we reviewed many thoughtful and cogent analyses that based on the rules governing the court and precedent, the case may not even get off the ground.

Not being an expert in the ICC, but knowing how so many supposedly neutral and objective international organizations have been corrupted by political animosity to Israel, I was skeptical:

>>>>>> Major caveat — these analyses assume that the ICC treats Israel the way it would treat any other nation, but anything that related to Israel always seems to skew international organizations, so I have my doubts. <<<<<<

And sure enough, right from the get-go, the ICC prosecutor has invented standards specifically for Israel.

Law Professor and international law expert Eugene Kontorovich describes at Volokh Conspiracy what has happened, ICC’s undermines its own independence with Palestine inquiry:

The ICC’s Prosecutor announced today the opening of a “preliminary examination” into “the Situation in Palestine.” This means she will consider, on jurisdictional, evidentiary and policy grounds whether to open an investigation into crimes that may have been committed during this summer’s Gaza conflict. Opening such an investigation is a fairly standard step after receiving a declaration of acceptance of jurisdiction under Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute, and would not normally warrant much notice (other preliminary investigations also involve alleged crimes by the U.S. in Afghanistan and the U.K. in Iraq, though precious few Americans or British are aware of this).

But this decision of the prosecutor is quite different, and extremely significant. The decision to open the inquiry involved the prosecutor determining that the Palestinian Authority is in fact a “state,” a necessary precondition to jurisdiction under the Rome Statute, the Court’s constitutive treaty.

The ICC has never accepted jurisdiction over what is clearly at most a “marginal” state – one that is not a U.N. member, that has not ever claimed to govern any territory, and whose recognition by other states is limited (for example, the U.S., Canada and most Western European states do not recognize the existence of a Palestinian state). This is clearly dramatically different from anything the Court has done before.

But the prosecutor did not actually determine the Palestine qualifies as a “state” under the well-established legal definitions of the term. Rather, she said that the U.N. General Assembly’s vote in 2012 to call Palestine a “non-member state” is dispositive of the question. In short, she substituted the determination of the General Assembly for her own. The GA is not a judicial body, but a political one. Its determinations are political, not legal. (It also has no power under the U.N. Charter, to create or recognize states.)

Read the whole thing.

The short story is the same story always — there are special rules for Israel.

The inherent intellectual and political corruption of international organizations is a good reason for the U.S. to continue not to join the Court.

As for the Hamas folks who fired rockets from residential areas (see Featured Image), they couldn’t care less about the ICC. Who’s going to arrest them in Gaza?

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