By backing arrest of Netanyahu, Trudeau aligns with Iran’s terror network
Canada is an outlier among democracies
TEL AVIV — In May, 2024, International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, K.C., abruptly cancelled a planned trip to Israel. Khan and ICC staff were meant to meet with Israeli officials in government, the military and NGO sectors.
Instead, on the same day he cancelled, Khan appeared before a panel of ICC judges asking them to consider issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant as well as Hamas senior leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif.
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It was no secret that Khan had long been mulling the possibility of slapping arrest warrants on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That he did so while appearing to be engaged in working with Israel and the United States, was malevolent and unprofessional.
Before asking a panel of ICC judges to consider issuing the warrants, Khan had a threshold legal and ethical duty. It was incumbent on him to provide evidence to the court that it had jurisdiction over the matter and that there was evidence to support the allegations of crimes having been committed against humanity.
In other words, Khan was pretending to plan for a trip to Israel to assess the factual basis for allegations that Israel’s prime minister, and others, had committed war crimes by deliberately starving the population of the Gaza Strip. He was also required to consider the robustness of the Israeli judicial system. If it was found to be capable of self-investigation and oversight, well, then, the ICC had no legal justification for inserting itself. This approach is hard-baked into the international legal doctrine of “complementarity” (which Khan seems to have overlooked in this case.)
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Furthermore, since Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Treaty, which established the ICC in 1998 (and came into force four years later), the Court has an additional problem. Does it have jurisdiction over Israel?
No.
Neither Israel nor Palestine are signatories to the Treaty.
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