If the court does not issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, it will lose what little legitimacy it has left.
People protest in support of Gaza at the headquarters of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands on October 18, 2023
Upon the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2002, a palpable hope arose that the era of impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide was coming to a close.
Twenty-two years later, the international legitimacy of the court hangs in the balance as it ignores calls to move swiftly against those responsible for mass atrocities in Gaza. In May, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan requested the court to issue warrants of arrest for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders. The ICC is yet to make a decision despite the mounting death toll in and destruction of Gaza amid Israel’s continuing genocidal violence.
The idea of a permanent international tribunal to prosecute war crimes first emerged in the wake of World War I in the legal circles of the victorious powers, but never materialised. After World War II, which killed an estimated 75-80 million people, several concepts of “justice” were floated.
At the 1943 Tehran Conference, during which the heads of state of the USSR, the United States and Great Britain met to discuss war strategy, Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin suggested that at least 50,000 of the German commanding staff must be eliminated. US President Franklin D Roosevelt replied, reportedly jokingly, that 49,000 should be executed. UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill argued for trying war criminals for their individual responsibilities.
Eventually, the allies established the Nuremberg and Tokyo military tribunals, which indicted 24 German and 28 Japanese military and civilian leaders, respectively. But this was, in essence, victors’ justice as none of the Allied powers’ leaders or military commanders were prosecuted for their war crimes. In the end, these tribunals were, arguably, a symbolic attempt at trying those who waged wars of aggression and committed genocide.
