ICC Faces Backlash for Arrest Warrants Against

ICC Faces Backlash for Arrest Warrants Against | Daily Tribune

In issuing arrest warrants against world leaders, geopolitical experts said the ICC has arrogated unto itself the kind of power that no world court should have.

The arrest warrants are directed at anyone they dislike, with whose policies they disagree, and whom the global elites wish to shut down, regardless of national sovereignty.

The ICC now considers itself to be above the law and is being encouraged to come for whomever it wants, whether they are part of the ICC treaty or not.

The recent actions it has taken were mostly against those who are not signatories to the Rome Statute that created the ICC and, thus, are those who do not subscribe to its broad powers.

A geopolitical commentator said the arrest warrant for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first against a democratically-elected leader from a free country with a viable judicial system.

“What is remarkable is that no arrest warrants to date have been issued for China’s President Xi Jinping for his genocidal acts against Tibetans and Uyghurs; Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for his murderous treatment of Iranians and minorities in his country; or Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who just days ago bombed the Kurds in northeast Syrian Kurdistan. The bombings cut off access to water and electricity for more than a million Kurds, who are already living in an area hit by drought,” the analyst said.

If the ICC were concerned with justice, it would have issued arrest warrants for Syria’s former president Bashar Al-Assad, a suggestion made more than a decade ago in 2012, at the beginning of the civil war in Syria, by former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Moreno-Ocampo urged the ICC then to adopt an “innovative” approach to stop the bloodshed in Syria by having the ICC indict Assad with an arrest warrant carried out by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces.

The investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against Prosecutor Karim Kahn have made the matter more complicated.

Facing a request from the Hungarian government for an external investigation into Khan’s alleged sexual misconduct, a news wire agency published a report on 9 November saying that Khan will face an external investigation of the allegations against him.

An internal document circulated to member states by ICC staff called on Khan to step down temporarily from his role at the ICC while the investigation was ongoing.

“The prosecutor should step aside with immediate effect to pave the way for an independent investigation,” the document said.

Khan, however, has stayed on. The ICC’s pre-trial chamber came to Khan’s rescue and issued the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and against a dead Hamas terrorist leader, Mohammed Deif, presumably to try to pretend that it was “balanced,” thereby completely burying Kahn’s sexual misconduct case in the news cycle.

Putting Khan’s issues aside, the arrest warrants represent an unprecedented power grab by the ICC, appropriating for itself the power to politicize a country’s right to self-defense, thereby turning on their heads the very rules of international law that the court purports to honor.

“Why did both Khan and ICC President Piotr Hofmanski meet with Qatar’s ambassador to the Netherlands last year? Surely Qatar had nothing to do with influencing the decision to issue the arrest warrants?” the geopolitical expert said.

Qatar’s news agency reported that the Qatari Ambassador to the Netherlands, Mutlaq bin Majed Al-Qahtani, met with Khan on 2 November 2023 to discuss the escalation in the Gaza Strip and several other issues of common interest.

About one month later, on 5 December 2023, the news agency reported that Al-Qahtani had also met with ICC President Hofmanski “to exchange views on issues of common interest and to discuss the latest developments in Gaza.”

In its desperation to recover from a disgraceful image due to the crisis brought about by Khan, the ICC has caused itself to sink deeper into quicksand that ensures its impending demise.