The International Criminal Court\u2019s prosecutor faced demands Tuesday for speedy action against Israeli leaders and a blistering Russian attack over the ICC\u2019s arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin stemming from Moscow\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. Karim Khan responded by telling the UN Security Council that he will not be swayed or intimidated as his team investigates possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza and the Palestinian territories as well as in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Libya\u2019s UN ambassador, Taher El-Sonni, told Khan that if the Libyan cases the ICC is investigating are so complex that they won\u2019t be completed until the end of 2025, he should allocate the court\u2019s efforts to the war in Gaza. El-Sonni claimed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are being perpetrated by Israeli forces. The world expects the ICC \u201cto be courageous and to issue arrest warrants against officials of the Israeli regime who have repeated again and again that they want to commit genocidal actions against Palestinians,\u201d El-Sonni said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you waiting for, Mr. Khan?\u201d, he added. \u201cDon\u2019t you see the threats against civilians, the potential threats against civilians in Rafah and the massacre that would happen at any time?\u201d El-Sonni was referring to the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza\u2019s southern city of Rafah, where 1.2 million Palestinians had fled seeking safety. The UN agency helping Palestinian refugees said Tuesday that nearly 450,000 have fled Rafah in the past week, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated that there is no safe place anywhere in Gaza.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the actual test of the ICC,\u201d El-Sonni said. \u201cIs the ICC politicised or is it independent and neutral?\u201d Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called the ICC a politicised \u201cpuppet body\u201d controlled by the West that \u201chas absolutely nothing to do with justice.\u201d The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin for alleged war crimes in March 2023, accusing the Russian president of personal responsibility for the abduction of children from Ukraine following Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Two months later, Russia issued an arrest warrant for Khan. The ICC called that warrant \u201cunacceptable\u201d and said the court \u201cwill remain undeterred in the conduct of its lawful mandate to ensure accountability for the gravest crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.\u201d Nebenzia also accused the ICC of accomplishing nothing since it began a preliminary examination of the situation in the Palestinian territories in 2015 and a formal investigation in 2021.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn this regard, one wonders if the effectiveness of the ICC on this track has been affected by the fact that a new bipartisan bill has been submitted to the US Congress to sanction ICC officials involved in investigating not only the US but its allies,\u201d he told the Security Council. Last week, two Republican congressmen introduced the \u201cIllegitimate Court Counteraction Act\u201d to impose sanctions on ICC officials that go after the United States or its allies including Israel.<\/p>\n
They cited reports the ICC is poised to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other high-ranking Israeli officials for their military offensive in Gaza following Hamas\u2019 October 7 surprise attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw about 250 people taken hostage. The act\u2019s supporters said that if the ICC was a legitimate tribunal it should have issued arrest warrants for Hamas leaders.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s military retaliation, now in its eighth month, has killed over 35,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children according to Gaza health officials, and it has sparked worldwide protests. Algeria\u2019s deputy UN ambassador, Nacim Gaouaoui, expressed hope the ICC will take \u201ca serious approach\u201d to its Palestinian investigations and \u201cdemonstrate that it is not a tool used by some members of the international community to threaten whoever they want, whenever they want.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khan said he wanted to assure Russia\u2019s ambassador that \u201cwe will not be swayed, whether it\u2019s by warrants for my arrest or the arrest of elected officials of the court by the Russian Federation, pr whether it\u2019s by other elected officials in any other jurisdiction.\u201d Khan said the ICC endeavours to be \u201cdeaf to the noise\u201d and this should be a time \u201cfor the law to be allowed to breathe,\u201d whether dealing with world crises like Ukraine, Gaza and the Palestinians, Libya or the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. \u201cWe have a duty to stand up for justice, to stand up for victims,\u201d Khan said. \u201cWe will stand up and apply the law with integrity, with independence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The International Criminal Court\u2019s prosecutor faced demands Tuesday for speedy action against Israeli leaders and a blistering Russian attack over\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":44367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[14010,1380,493,11390,6105,1418,2605,536,7521,9524,265,775,1905],"class_list":["post-44366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-arrest-warrants","tag-gaza","tag-humanitarian-crisis","tag-icc","tag-intimidation","tag-israel-hamas-war","tag-myanmar","tag-palestine","tag-prosecution","tag-rohingya-genocide","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-unsc","tag-war-crimes"],"reading_time":"4 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}