ICC’s ruling on Palestine fetches mixed reactions from the stakeholders

On Friday, the International Criminal Court passed a landmark ruling that it had jurisdiction over the unrest in Palestinian territories which have occupied and opened doors for a possible war crimes investigation and has attracted mixed reactions from world leaders. 

Fatou Bensouda, a prosecutor working with the ICC, announced in 2019 her desire for an extensive probe in the territories, post which she requested the court for a legal opinion on its reach in Israel occupied areas. 

The ruling given by the ICC had mixed reactions from countries that considered to be stakeholders in the conflict. The US showed “serious concerns” about the verdict while Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the ICC a “political body”.

On the contrary, Palestine showed support and said that step is a “victory for justice and humanity, for the values of truth, fairness and freedom, and for the blood of the victims and their families”.

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The ICC, where Palestine is a state party unlike Israel, said that the judges had “decided, by a majority, that the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the Situation in Palestine, a State party to the ICC Rome Statute, extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

The court reaffirmed that the verdict was is related to Palestine’s statehood but should be tried in respect to the United Nations General Assembly’s provision of “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

The statement said, “The chamber is neither adjudicating a border dispute under international law nor prejudging the question of any future borders” but was for the “sole purpose of defining the Court’s territorial jurisdiction.”

Former US President Donald Trump’s administration slammed a flurry of sanctions on the prosecutor and another senior ICC official in September.

The United States, which is not a member of the ICC, inflicted the measures on the court after earlier visa bans on Bensouda and others failed to head off the court’s war crimes investigations into US military personnel in Afghanistan. But the US has also cited the court’s treatment of its ally Israel.

Israel’s Netanyahu Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Friday’s decision.

“The tribunal has, once again, proved that it is a political body and not a judicial institution,” Netanyahu said in a statement, adding the decision undermined the “right of democracies to defend themselves against terrorism”.

Hussein al-Sheikh, the Civil Affairs minister of Palestine wrote on Twitter about the ruling and said it was a “victory for law, justice, liberty and moral values in the world.”

The US State Department, led by Antony Blinken, said that Israel shall not be bound by the court’s decision as it is not a member. 

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Ned Price, the department’s spokesperson said, “We have serious concerns about the ICC’s attempts to exercise jurisdiction over Israeli personnel. We have always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it or are referred by the UN Security Council.”

Human Rights Watch however said the ruling was “pivotal”, adding that it was “high time that Israeli and Palestinian perpetrators of the gravest abuses” should face justice.

“The ICC’s decision finally offers victims of serious crimes some real hope for justice after a half-century of impunity,” Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at HRW, said in a statement.

ICC prosecutor Bensouda, who steps down in June, has urged the Biden administration to lift the sanctions.

In a separate case, the ICC in September dismissed an appeal against a decision not to probe Israel over a deadly raid on an aid flotilla to Gaza in 2010.