Lawyers launch legal challenge against ICC decision on Netanyahu arrest warrant

The International Criminal Court has accepted a request by four leading NGOs challenging the arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes.

UK Lawyers for Israel, The International Legal Forum, B’nai B’rith and the Jerusalem Initiative are challenging the ICC’s decision to grant the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants against the ministers over Israel’s response to Hamas’s massacre on October 7.

Arsen Ostrovsky, chief executive of The International Legal Forum, said: “The ICC prosecutor’s decision to seek arrest warrants against the prime minister and defence minister of Israel was an egregious and unprecedented violation of every norm of international law, that is not only entirely lacking in substance, but also underscores the court’s blatant lack of jurisdiction in the first instance to pursue the Israeli leaders.”

He added that the ministers had “already gone above and beyond to unprecedented levels, to abide by international law in response to the terrorist entity Hamas, who committed the massacre of October 7 and continues to hold 120 hostages captive in Gaza”.

This follows the ICC’s decision on 27 June to grant the UK government leave to appeal the prosecutor’s request on the basis he lacks jurisdiction over Israeli nationals.

The NGOs agreed that under the Oslo Accords, Palestine should not have criminal jurisdiction over Israeli citizens that can be delegated to the ICC, and have now been afforded the same right of being granted leave to make submissions alongside countries such as the United States, Germany, Czech Republic and Argentina.

The NGOs pointed out that Israel has a “widely respected, independent and robust national legal system”.

The court also accepted a separate request, by the NGOs alongside the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, to submit written observations regarding what the NGOs have said to be factual inaccuracies and the omission of relevant information and evidence that contradict the prosecutor’s allegations in his applications for the arrest warrants of the Israeli leaders.

Jonathan Turner, chief Executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, said: “We welcome the opportunity to challenge the jurisdiction of the ICC, particularly in the light of our inquiries, which showed that neither the ICC itself nor its members have even seen the key document on which its previous majority ruling on jurisdiction was based.”

Turner added that the order by the court to make all the observations in one single 10-page document is “unsatisfactory”.

“The condition that our submissions detailing the numerous inaccuracies in the allegations made by the prosecutor, as well as submissions on jurisdiction and admissibility, must all be confined within ten pages, is a highly unsatisfactory restriction. It will seriously curtail our attempt to ensure that the court acts on the basis of true information.

"It is a matter of serious concern, liable to produce grave injustice, if the court is not willing to examine the detailed evidence we present demonstrating the inaccuracy of the Prosecutor’s allegations against Israel.”