Advertisement
More than 120 countries are members of the court. The United States, China, India, Russia and Israel are not.
The International Criminal Court is the world’s highest criminal court, prosecuting warlords and heads of state alike. But several powerful countries, including the United States, do not recognize its authority and refuse to become members.
The court was created over two decades ago to hold people accountable for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide under the Rome Statute, a 1998 treaty. On Thursday, it issued warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Israel’s former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and Muhammad Deif, Hamas’s military chief.
The United States, which has been involved in major conflicts since the court’s creation, has abstained from membership, seeking to prevent the tribunal from being used to prosecute Americans.
More than 120 countries are members of the court, including many European nations, and members are formally committed to carrying out arrest warrants if a wanted person steps on their soil. But powerful nations including China, India, Russia and Israel, like the United States, are not members.
U.S. presidential administrations from both parties have argued in the past that the court should not exercise its authority over citizens from countries that are not a member of the court.
“There remains fear of actually being investigated by the court for the commission of atrocity crimes, given the military projection of both countries regionally or globally, and fear of being prosecuted for political, rather than evidence-based, reasons,” said David Scheffer, a former U.S. ambassador and a chief negotiator of the statute that established the court.
Mr. Scheffer added that there were strong rebuttals to those fears, including that “no country’s leaders should, as a matter of policy and of law, enjoy impunity for intentionally committing genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.” This argument, he said in an email, “has been pursued with determination (and American support) in Ukraine, which shortly will become the 125th member of the I.C.C.”
The Biden administration swiftly denounced the I.C.C.’s decision on Thursday.
“The United States fundamentally rejects the court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials,” a spokesman for President Biden’s National Security Council said in a statement. “We remain deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision.”
Several prominent Republicans, too, condemned it, including Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has tapped to be his national security adviser. Mr. Waltz said in a statement on Thursday that Israel had acted “lawfully” during the war in Gaza and that the United States had rejected the court’s charges.
He also warned the court and the United Nations about the Trump administration’s position toward the bodies once it takes office. “You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC & UN come January,” he wrote on X.
The former ambassador John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, condemned the court’s prosecutor, accusing him of “moral equivalence.”
“These indictments prove precisely what is wrong with the ICC. A publicity-hungry Prosecutor first goes after the victims of a terrorist attack, before going after the real criminals,” he said, adding “I hope this is the death knell of the ICC in the United States.”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting.
Advertisement
