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The ICC is not a real court – it’s a tool of anti-Israel NGOs

The real reason it wants Netanyahu arrested is to stop a democratically elected prime minister defending his country against a war of extermination

November 25, 2024 09:23
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Karim Khan KC (Getty)
3 min read

The International Criminal Court (ICC) had noble aims – or so we thought. Before heading off to Rome to watch 120 states sign the court’s founding statute in 1998, I took the BBC’s cameras to the killing fields of Sarajevo to show viewers why tyrants from the former Yugoslavia should not be allowed to escape justice.

What I hadn’t expected to find when I arrived at this United Nations diplomatic conference was that the world’s first permanent international criminal court was being constructed not by governments but by non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

In 1995, a Coalition for the International Criminal Court was founded by 25 civil society organisations. As the coalition now recalls, it “ensured that states negotiated a strong treaty”. These NGOs provided briefing papers to national delegations and raised concerns when their objectives were watered down. “Civil society organisations played a key role in advocating for creating the ICC,” the court acknowledged at a meeting with NGOs in 2019.

Israel and the United States recognised almost from the outset that this was turning into warfare – politics by other means.

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