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Hungary is launching the process of leaving the International Criminal Court, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s cabinet chief said on Thursday, making the country the only EU member and the only Nato country other than the US and Turkey to shun the ICC.
Hungary has long criticised the court, most recently over an international arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who begins a four-day visit in Budapest on Thursday.
“The withdrawal process begins on Thursday, in line with Hungary’s constitutional and international legal obligations,” cabinet chief Gergely Gulyás told state news agency MTI.
The decision comes as Netanyahu makes his first trip to an ICC member since the body issued an arrest warrant last year for him and then-defence minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts”.
Both denied the charges and dismissed them as antisemitic, but had curtailed their international travel, with Netanyahu only recently travelling to the US, which also rejects the court’s jurisdiction.
Even with Hungary’s decision to withdraw from the ICC, Netanyahu and Gallant face the prospect of arrest in more than 120 countries — including the rest of the EU, the UK and much of Asia and Africa — on those charges, which focus on Israel’s response to Hamas’ cross-border raid on Oct 7, 2023 that sparked the war.
Israel has imposed complete sieges on Gaza at least twice since the war began, with no humanitarian aid allowed in for weeks at a time, and has tightly controlled the entry of food, medicine and other crucial supplies except during brief ceasefires.
Its military has also killed at least 50,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials,
The ICC prosecutor also requested warrants for three Hamas leaders for war crimes over their role in the attacks, in which local officials say 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, but all three are now believed to be dead.
Hungary, as well as other European states such as Germany and Poland that are signatories to the ICC’s founding Rome Statute, have signalled that they would host Netanyahu and find ways to avoid arresting him, chipping away at the court’s authority.
Hungary has called the arrest warrant another form of antisemitism that it says motivates international bodies such as the UN.
“The ICC . . . has lost its credibility and seriousness when it issued an arrest warrant against the prime minister of Israel,” Hungary’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó said earlier this year.
Israel’s foreign minister welcomed the move, saying he’d worked with Szijjártó on the issue. “The so-called “International Criminal Court” lost its moral authority after trampling the fundamental principles of international law in its zest for harming Israel’s right to self-defence,” Gideon Sa’ar said in a statement.
The EU Commission’s foreign affairs spokesperson said on Tuesday that Brussels “would, of course, deeply regret if any of our member states would decide to withdraw from the ICC [via] a written notification addressed to the secretary-general of the UN”.
“However, such a withdrawal takes effect one year after the notification . . . and does not affect a state’s duty of co-operation in relation to investigations,” the spokesperson added.
