Frederick Deknatel is the Executive Editor of Democracy in Exile, the DAWN journal.
When the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, announced last week that he had applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three leaders of Hamas—including its most senior official in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar—the reaction from Washington was swift condemnation. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, along with a chorus in Congress, quickly denounced the charges as "outrageous," "shameful" and implying false "equivalence" between Hamas and Israel. It was a stark contrast to how the Biden administration had welcomed the ICC's arrest warrant last year for Russian President Vladimir Putin over war crimes in Ukraine.
In his application for the warrants, Khan alleged that the three Hamas leaders committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, including taking hostages. He also alleged that Netanyahu and Gallant have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel's ongoing military campaign in Gaza, including the intentional starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.
"I've had some elected leaders speak to me and be very blunt," Khan told CNN in an interview announcing the warrant requests, when asked about the outright threats to the ICC recently from U.S. lawmakers, mostly Republicans. "'This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,' was what one senior leader told me," he said. "We don't view it like that. This court is the legacy of Nuremberg. This court is a sad indictment of humanity. This court should be the triumph of law over power and brute force."
Days after the ICC's announcement, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah, in southern Gaza, in new provisional measures issued in the case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Israeli officials, defiant, vowed to continue military operations in and around Rafah. On Sunday, May 26, an Israeli airstrike on a tent camp for displaced people in Rafah killed at least 45 Palestinians, many of them children burned alive. The bombs used were supplied by the United States, according to weapons experts.
To take stock of the historic decision to seek ICC arrest warrants for Israeli officials, as well as Hamas leaders, Democracy in Exile reached out to DAWN's non-resident fellows—scholars, lawyers and other experts on international justice. Can international law lead to accountability in Gaza?
Israel has made no secret of the fact that it views itself as immune from any international laws or any international legal system.
- Diana Buttu
Daring to Hold Israel Responsible
As I watched the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and later the chief justice of the International Court of Justice read out their statements, I could not help but worry about the ways in which Israel would lash out against Palestinians—and likely others—for daring to try to hold Israel responsible for its heinous war crimes. On cue, we witnessed Israel double down to indicate that it will ignore the ICJ's rulings (or parse them to the point of incomprehension). Then, this weekend, Israel dropped a bomb on Palestinians in tents in Rafah; they were seeking shelter in an area marked as a humanitarian zone.
The reason for all this is clear: Israel has made no secret of the fact that it views itself as immune from any international laws or any international legal system. And, in a way, Israeli leaders are correct. Owing to the (by its very nature) dysfunctional international system, Israel has managed over the past eight decades to get away with virtually anything, including bombing U.N. buildings and refugees camps, engaging in torture and now, even genocide.
This is the problem. While the international legal system can hold people to account—after the fact—there is still no effective mechanism to stop the worst of Israel's atrocities as they take place. There is no international mechanism to stop a nuclear superpower from attacking a stateless, refugee population. The ICJ ruling and the intended ICC arrest warrants are aimed at sending the message to Israel that it has gone too far. But subtlety is not a language that Israel understands, which is why, despite feeling that the era of Israeli impunity is coming to an end—albeit at a snail's pace—absent bold measures to stop Israel, we will be witnessing in the coming days and perhaps weeks more massacres like Sunday's brutal attack on the tent camp in Rafah.
—Diana Buttu is a Palestinian lawyer, writer and analyst. A Palestinian citizen of Israel based in Haifa, she is a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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Exposing Israel's Own Deteriorated Legal System
The motion filed by the ICC prosecutor for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minster of Defense Yoav Gallant demonstrates the deeply deteriorated reputation that the international legal community ascribes to Israeli law enforcement authorities. When it comes to treatment of Palestinians, the image of the Israeli legal system as robust, independent and professional has been in decline for years, and this process has reached a low point with the current proceedings at the ICC.
Indeed, Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations have been exposing for years the systematic failures of the Israeli law enforcement authorities, arguing that these agencies are both unwilling and unable to genuinely investigate and prosecute Israeli civilians, as well as Israeli security forces who have allegedly violated international laws of war and international laws of belligerent occupation; that police and military police investigations are rare and when conducted are a sham; that Israeli courts are distorting the content of international law; and that Israeli decision-makers and policymakers are never investigated.
The most striking conclusion, as far as the Israeli legal system is concerned, from the motion for arrest warrants filed by the ICC prosecutor is that even the image of the Israeli Supreme Court has been completely shattered. A court which once enjoyed superb public relations and was celebrated, in the 1980s, by many international legal scholars as an independent, professional and activist court—and a rare example of a national court that is ready to intervene in the actions of the Israeli executive for the protection of people who are not its citizens (an image vastly exaggerated even back then)—has now lost the trust that it can provide justice.
—Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and the author of The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights, is a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
Biden's Hypocrisy—and Complicity
Two consecutive decisions last week—by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who will seek arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and by the International Court of Justice, ordering Israel to halt its military assault on Rafah in southern Gaza—exposed Israel's blatant disregard of international law and institutions. These decisions also highlighted the hypocrisy of Israel's staunchest supporters in the West, especially the United States and Britain, for their attempts to undermine the legitimacy of both the ICC and ICJ because of their criticisms of Israel. It's clear that a handful of Western politicians, led by President Joe Biden, are willing to demolish any semblance of an international rules-based order to protect Israel and the extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
In much of the Global South, the United States has become a laughingstock for celebrating the ICC issuing an arrest warrant last year against Russian President Vladmir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine—and Washington's numerous statements urging U.S. adversaries, in particular Russia and Myanmar, to abide by past ICJ rulings on Ukraine and the Rohingya, respectively. But the Biden administration is not only exposing itself to charges of hypocrisy in the way it has tried discredit international courts and other bodies that criticize Israel.
The United States is the largest supplier of weapons to Israel, providing $3.8 billion in military aid per year, and Washington is potentially complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity due to Israel's brutal conduct of its war in Gaza. In early May, Biden confirmed that his administration had suspended one shipment of weapons to Israel, delaying the delivery of 3,500 munitions—mostly 2,000-pound bombs that can cause tremendous damage when dropped on densely populated areas of Gaza, as Israel has done throughout this war. But less than a week later, Biden changed course and resumed sending far more arms to Israel than the single shipment he had held back. The administration notified Congress on May 14 that it had approved more than $1 billion in new weapons shipments to Israel, even as it became clear that Netanyahu had defied months of warnings from Biden and was moving ahead with a devastating invasion of Rafah. These arms are part of $26 billion in additional aid to Israel, which Congress approved in April, after months of lobbying by the Biden administration. The aid package includes $14 billion in unconditional military assistance to Israel—and it sends a message to Netanyahu that he and his government still have unwavering support from the United States, no matter how far Israel goes in undermining international courts and justice.
—Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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A Semblance of Justice, at Last?
For decades, the ramifications of Israeli occupation and blockade have been evident to the international community, as the subject of countless reports and condemnations. At the same time, there has been no justice for Palestinians, only continued dispossession, while Israel continues to enjoy near boundless support from the world's most powerful countries.
What is left? The International Criminal Court, maybe, which has had jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories since 2014. An ICC investigation was not opened, however, until 2021, and it was essentially silent until last week. The ICC has faced a host of critiques since its inception in 2002, but is this a path forward for the justice that has eluded Palestinians for nearly a century?
The mere announcement of arrest warrants for Israeli politicians—along with leadership of Hamas—is certainly unprecedented. Curiously, however, as with many discussions of Palestinians in the past eight months, history seems to have started on Oct. 7, 2023, as all potential charges brought by the ICC prosecutor related only to actions taken on or after that date. These charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity include the crime of starvation as a method of warfare, a reality confirmed by almost every humanitarian organization on the ground in Gaza—and denied by the Israeli policymakers who explicitly boasted about withholding aid. Perhaps it was this combination of obvious intent and the predictable outcomes of this policy, including multiple accounts of children starving to death, that motivated Karim Khan to lead with this charge.
We are still at the very early stages of this process, and regardless, no ICC action will result in the long overdue liberation of Palestine. Whether this action will lead to some semblance of justice, though, incorporating the totality of violations manifest in Israel's apartheid system and settler colonial project, is still unknown.
—Yara M. Asi, an assistant professor of global health management and informatics at the University of Central Florida, and the author of How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health, is a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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The Gradual End of Israel's Absolute Impunity
It has been clear for months that Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, intended to prosecute the Hamas leadership. Many expected him to give the Israeli leadership a pass, and like the United States and Europe, focus instead on a few extremist Israeli settlers. Yet the global outcry against Khan's inertia, coupled with the sheer scale of Israeli crimes and their brazen nature, ultimately appeared to force his hand and seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders. To have done otherwise would have brought the ICC into terminal disrepute.
While the prospects of Israeli leaders actually being put on trial in The Hague are at best exceptionally remote, the indictments are nevertheless of strategic significance. Together with the genocide case currently before the International Court of Justice, the era of absolute impunity enjoyed by the Israeli state and its leaders appears to be coming to a gradual end. The hysterical responses to these developments from across the Israeli political spectrum are genuine rather than performative, for the simple reason that accountability, even the pretense of it, are as foreign to Israel as captivity for a tiger.
In the more immediate term, Israel's sponsors and allies are the ones to watch. Will they continue their shamelessly unconditional embrace and support of Israel's genocidal apartheid regime, and in the process put the torch to international institutions that get in the way? Or will they reduce their patronage and take protective measures to limit their own exposure to criminal liability and the wrath of their own citizens?
—Mouin Rabbani is co-editor of Jadaliyya, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
When it comes to treatment of Palestinians, the image of the Israeli legal system as robust, independent and professional has been in decline for years, and this process has reached a low point with the current proceedings at the ICC.
- Michael Sfard
Starvation as a Weapon of War—in Gaza and Sudan
The leaders of Sudan and Israel, erstwhile enemies until a hastily cobbled-together Abraham Accords deal in the dying days of Donald Trump's presidency made them security partners, have faced increasingly similar fates in international justice.
After decades of impunity, Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, an Islamist military dictator, was the first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes by the ICC, in 2009, providing a useful precedent to enable similar charges to be brought against Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Palestinian people. With these charges comes the critical understanding that various methods, beyond bullets and missiles, are deployed by de facto (Sudan) or de jure (Israel) state authorities to kill large populations, including and especially pertinent today, the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
Bashir's heirs, in every way, are the two generals waging war over Sudan: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces, who seized the opportunity to normalize relations with Israel following secret February 2020 meetings in Uganda, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the former Janjaweed commander who now heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both Burhan and Hemedti have followed the well-used Bashir playbook of starvation, while using Netanyahu's own crimes in Gaza as a cover for their own. After all, who could prosecute Burhan and Hemedti for the starvation of people held hostage in their war, when Netanyahu was unabashedly doing the same for those in Gaza, with much international (i.e. Western) support.
The first charge in the arrest warrants sought by the ICC prosecutor against Netanyahu and Gallant is "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime" contrary to the Rome Statute. That sets a timely legal basis for prosecuting Sudan's generals with the charge of starvation, the act of intentionally starving populations through the denial of access to food and aid.
Burhan, who maintains that he is still the head of state of Sudan, is uniquely vulnerable to such charges as responsibility for starvation would fall under the state's jurisdiction. And like his Israeli counterpart, Burhan has been vocal about enacting war crimes, with a public vow earlier this year, in February, that humanitarian access to areas held by the rival RSF—where 90 percent of Sudanese civilians already or soon to be facing famine are—will not happen until his Sudanese Armed Forces "end this war and defeat these criminal rebels and drive them from … all the cities that they have plundered." These are the same cities, not incidentally, that Burhan's army is now starving through its impediments to humanitarian access.
The ICC already has jurisdiction to investigate crimes in Darfur, where the majority of the denial of access to aid and relief, and consequently famine—potentially the world's largest in decades—is happening today. The ICC prosecutor's request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders should prompt similar warrants to hold Burhan, Hemedti and others in Sudan responsible for the established war crime of starving civilians and finally "prove, tangibly, that the lives of all human beings have equal value," as Khan has said—even the neglected civilians of Sudan.
—Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political analyst and the founding director of Confluence Advisory, a "think-and-do" tank formerly based in Khartoum, is a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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International Law's Biggest Test
The ICC prosecutor's announcement seeking arrest warrants for three senior Hamas leaders and two senior Israeli leaders raises a host of significant legal and political issues that promise to ripple through the international order. Given that the three Hamas leaders are already politically ostracized in much of the world, the true consequences of the prosecutor's application will likely fall on Israel and its political and military leadership.
Two issues, in particular, are important to highlight. First, should the ICC approve the prosecutor's application—and it has almost always granted these requests—this will be the first time that an international forum has imposed a meaningful political cost on Israel for its many violations of international law.
The hundreds of resolutions critical of Israel adopted by the principal United Nations forums, from the Security Council to the General Assembly to the Human Rights Council, have been assiduously ignored by Israel, primarily because of the impenetrable diplomatic shield provided by the United States. Similarly, the legally binding provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice in January, March and again last week—ordering Israel to strictly obey its mandatory obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza unhindered and, most recently, to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah—have had no discernable impact on Israel's conduct of its war on Gaza.
Now, at last, an international legal forum may issue an order that will actually sting Israel. Assuming that the ICC issues the arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the 124 member states of the Court will be required to arrest them, should either appear on their soil, and turn them over to The Hague. For the first time ever, the leadership of a close ally of the Global North may be called to account for war crimes and crimes against humanity before an international criminal tribunal. However unlikely that might turn out to be, it adds a further indelible stain to Israel's plummeting international reputation.
The second issue to highlight is the principle of complementarity. When the ICC was created through the 1998 Rome Statute, the member states agreed that it would be a court of last resort. Only if the state which has jurisdiction over the targeted persons could not, or would not, investigate and prosecute them would the ICC seek to arrest, charge and try the alleged perpetrators.
After Karim Khan's announcement, Israel's attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, stated that Israel was actively investigating allegations of war crimes in Gaza, and criticized the prosecutor for his "baseless" request for the arrest warrants. As she argued: "The decision of the prosecutor ignores, among other things, the fact that Israeli legal system has proved its independence in the past, its impartiality and its commitment to the values of truth and justice."
Israel will have a very high mountain to climb in order to dissuade the ICC from invoking the complementarity principle in this case. Israel's own long-standing unwillingness to initiate any meaningful inquiries into the many credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Israeli forces is a shaky foundation to persuasively argue that it is capable of investigating itself. Nonetheless, we can expect both Israel and the United States in the months ahead to rely upon the complementarity principle to assertively lobby both the ICC prosecutor's office and European members of the ICC to stall the issuance of the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, or even to withdraw them. The biggest test for international law arising from the war on Gaza is yet to come.
—Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, from 2016 to 2022, is a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
Leaving Israel—and the U.S.—More Isolated Internationally
British barrister Karim Khan was elected ICC prosecutor in February 2021 with the expectation that he would continue in his predecessor's slow walking of the investigation into Israeli violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories and during the 2014 Gaza war. Only the severity of the potential war crimes committed by both Hamas on Oc. 7 and by Israel in its current war on Gaza compelled him to accelerate the procedures. Unusually, Khan publicly announced his applications for warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders in a press conference, to great fanfare on social media.
Khan acted despite having received a letter last month from 12 Republican senators in the U.S. threatening to "target" him if the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other Israeli officials. The senators' letter declared they would interpret the issuance of such warrants "not only as a threat to Israel's sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States."
President Joie Biden was less blatantly threatening. But he denounced as "outrageous" Khan's application for a warrant against Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. "Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas," Biden declared. Khan, of course, had not implied any equivalence, only equality under the law. "If we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as being applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions for its collapse," Khan said in announcing his request for arrest warrants.
Democratic and Republican leaders are united on the principle that the United States and its allies are immune from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and of the application of international law more broadly. Yet important U.S. allies have defended the ICC's independence. So, while there is little to no chance that either the Israeli or Hamas leaders threatened with ICC warrants will actually be arrested, ongoing U.S. support for Israel as it plausibly commits a genocide in Gaza is leading to intensified international isolation of both Israel and the U.S.
—Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University, and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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Liberalism's Contradictions and Imperial Sympathies
The rule of law is a foundational value in liberal thought. From the ancients to the moderns, this principle is repeatedly emphasized by theorists of liberalism as essential to the creation of a just and stable political order. So why are so many Western liberal governments and intellectuals outraged that the rule of law is being applied to the Israel-Gaza war? The writings of two canonical philosophers of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, help explain this contradiction.
Mill wrote eloquently and influentially on the concepts of liberty and self-determination. He was adamant, however, that these ideas did not apply to "those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage." In other words, non-Western societies are developmentally like children who are in need supervision before they can be set free to govern themselves. Until this moment arrives, Mill argued, "despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians."
Similarly, Tocqueville wrote insightfully about democracy in America. When he traveled to the early American republic in 1831, he also met indigenous populations and expressed considerable empathy for their plight. These sentiments were noticeably absent, however, when France sought to conquer Algeria. Tocqueville was a vociferous proponent of Algeria's brutal colonization. "The right of war," he wrote in his Essay on Algeria, "authorizes us to ravage the country … by destroying harvests during the harvest season, or year-round by making those rapid incursions called razzias, whose purpose is to seize men or herds."
How to explain these contradictions? For all their well-known theories about modern liberal values, Mill and Tocqueville were also directly involved with the management of empire. Mill spent his career in the British East India Company, which dominated British colonial India, and Tocqueville was a member of France's National Assembly during the French conquest of Algeria and also served briefly as French foreign minister in 1849. In the clash between the universal pretensions of liberalism and the needs of empire, the latter always won out. Arguments were then developed to justify glaring contractions. In short, liberalism has always coexisted with imperial domination.
There is a straight line one can draw from Mill and Tocqueville to Joe Biden and Antony Blinken. Biden, who promised that his administration would "hold to account those who perpetrate human rights abuses," has instead given Israel "ironclad" support despite its plausible genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. With a straight face, Blinken can comfortably state that "human rights will be the center of our foreign policy" and then call the ICC prosecutor's application for arrest warrants of Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes "shameful" and suggest that the Court could be punished with sanctions. More glaring contradictions.
—Nader Hashemi, a non-resident fellow at DAWN, is the director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University
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Biden's Blatant Double Standards
The ICC prosecutor's request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders drove a wedge between Washington and many of its European allies. In contrast to its stand on the Middle East, the Biden team has tried to milk for everything it is worth the ICC's 2023 arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over his war crimes in Ukraine. The European Union had welcomed the Putin judgment, and the U.S. successfully rallied its allies to boycott Russian interests. Europe has been consistent, but President Joe Biden has not, pointing to a mounting split.
Biden administration officials dismissed the Netanyahu and Gallant warrant request on two grounds—that prosecutor Karim Khan made an unacceptable "equivalence" between Israel and Hamas, and that the ICC has no jurisdiction in Palestine and Israel anyway. In fact, Hamas was charged with different offenses than was Israel. Moreover, neither Russia nor Ukraine are signatories of the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, but Kyiv gave permission to the ICC to take up Russian war crimes on its soil. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority—essentially a creation of the United States that relies on continued Western backing to survive—acceded to the Rome Statute in 2015 as a U.N. non-member observer state. The ICC's jurisdiction in Gaza is substantially better established under international law than in Ukraine.
Unlike Biden, Europe has largely backed the court over the warrant requests for Israeli leaders. Washington's determination to bestow impunity on Netanyahu's extremist government has set it at odds with its European allies. They are now peeling off, such that Ireland, Norway and Spain have recognized Palestine and denounced Israel's war crimes in Gaza. The Biden administration has a choice of remaining a world leader or being a crooked lawyer for regimes it happens to back. It cannot be both.
—Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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The ICC Can Hold Majors Power to Account
Since its establishment in 2002, the ICC has been consistently criticized for its perceived inability to challenge power inequalities in the international system and for bias against African leaders. So May 20, 2024 marks a milestone in the ICC's mission, when chief prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas officials, on "reasonable grounds to believe" they bear responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. While the arrest warrants for Hamas officials were expected, the warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant challenge the long-held criticisms of the ICC as a biased institution unable to hold major powers accountable.
The symbolic significance of ICC prosecutions for war crimes in Israel and Gaza could signal the end of realpolitik, where leaders have all too willingly used their power to disregard international law and ethical concerns. The ICC was established in 2002 as the permanent court of last resort to prosecute individuals responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression. It has the capacity to investigate crimes committed in all 124 states that are party to the Rome Statute that created the court, as well as in other states that have not joined the ICC when alleged atrocities are referred by the U.N. Security Council.
Historically, those charged by the ICC were the so-called usual suspects: Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir on allegations including genocide in Darfur, and former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on charges linked to the brutal suppression of anti-government protests in 2011. When the ICC issued a warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, on charges of responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children since Russia's full-scale invasion, it signaled a break with the court's history of not holding major powers to account. But the most recent charges could potentially solidify the ICC as the powerful independent institution it was meant to be. Countries such as the United States, Russia and China, which have not signed the Rome Statute, do not carry influence on who is prosecuted by the court, leading to an institution that is only bound by the rules of international law.
The ICC prosecutor's request for warrants, along with the International Court of Justice's initial rulings in January in the genocide case against Israel, underscore that it is increasingly the Global South that is leading the international system of states to abide by a rules-based order—and showing that accountability in the system is possible.
—Dalia Fahmy, an associate professor of political science at Long Island University and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, is a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
