This week, The Jerusalem Post Podcast hosted Yuval Shany, an Israeli scholar of humanitarian law and human rights, who said that the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant could haunt them for the rest of their lives.
“The arrest wards will be hanging over the head of [Gallant and Netanyahu] until the case is closed, and that may mean, if it’s never closed, they will have this for the rest of their lives, hanging over their heads,” he said.
“For some, the court is a hero because they are going after the Israelis, who are closely related to a very powerful state, the United States,” he explained. “But others see this as troubling because it could limit their own ability to conduct counterterrorism operations.”
When it comes to the US, he said that Israel’s biggest ally sees a “troubling development” in the ICC call.
“The court has been going quite aggressively against a democratic western state that is fighting a terror group… and this could be a new playbook that is going to significantly limit their own ability to conduct counterterrorism operations going forward,” he said.
Complementarity – the good, the bad, and the problematic
Shany further explained the issue with complementarity in the ICC case.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights defines complementarity as “the basis of the relationship between the International Criminal Court and national courts in relation to the application of international criminal law. It means that the ICC has secondary jurisdiction after national courts, and can only act in a given situation if the relevant states are unwilling or unable to prosecute the crimes within their jurisdiction.”
He explained that as long as “Israel does not open a criminal investigation, it cannot invoke complementarity, and as long as it does not invoke complementarity, the proceedings in The Hague are likely to continue.
“The prosecutor mismanaged the complementarity issue and didn’t go out of his way to afford Israel complementarity,” he said.
