UNITED NATIONS — The International Criminal Court prosecutor on Tuesday faced demands for swift action against Israeli leaders and a blistering Russian attack on the ICC’s arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Karim Khan responded by telling the UN Security Council that he will not be influenced or intimidated as his team investigates possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, as well as in Ukraine.
Libya’s UN ambassador, Taher El-Sonni, told Khan that if the Libyan cases the ICC is investigating are so complex that they will not be concluded until the end of 2025, he should redirect the court’s efforts to the war in Gaza.
El-Sonni claimed that genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed by Israeli forces.
The world expects the ICC “to be courageous and issue arrest warrants against officials of the Israeli regime who have repeated time and again their intention to carry out genocidal actions against Palestinians,” El-Sonni said.
“What are you waiting for, Mr Khan?” he added. “Don’t you see the threats against civilians, the potential threats against civilians in Rafah and the massacre that could happen at any moment?”
El-Sonni was referring to the latest Israeli offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where 1.2 million Palestinians had fled in search of safety. The U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees said Tuesday that nearly 450,000 people have fled Rafah in the past week, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated that there is no safe place anywhere in Gaza.
“This is the ICC’s actual test,” El-Sonni said. “Is the ICC politicized or is it independent and neutral?”
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called the ICC a politicized “puppet body” controlled by the West that “has absolutely nothing to do with justice.”
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin in March 2023 for alleged war crimes, accusing the Russian president of personal responsibility for the kidnapping of children from Ukraine following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Two months later, Russia issued an arrest warrant for Khan. The ICC called that order “unacceptable” and said the court “will remain undaunted in carrying out its lawful mandate to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.”
Nebenzia also accused the ICC of not having achieved anything since it began a preliminary investigation into the situation in the Palestinian territories in 2015 and a formal investigation in 2021.
“In this regard, one wonders whether the ICC’s effectiveness in this area has been compromised by the fact that a new bipartisan bill has been introduced in the US Congress to sanction ICC officials involved in investigations into not only the US but also their allies.” he told the Security Council.
Last week, two Republican members of Congress introduced the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” to impose sanctions on ICC officials who go after the United States or its allies, including Israel.
They cited reports that the ICC is about to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials over their military offensive in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7 surprise attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and about 250 people were killed. people taken hostage. The law’s supporters said that if the ICC was a legitimate tribunal, it should have issued arrest warrants for Hamas leaders.
Israel’s military retaliation, now in its eighth month, has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children according to Gaza health officials, and has sparked global protests.
Algeria’s deputy UN ambassador, Nacim Gaouaoui, expressed hope that the ICC will “take a serious approach” to its Palestinian investigations and “demonstrate that it is not an instrument used by some members of the international community to threaten those who they want, whenever they want. ”
Khan said he wanted to assure the Russian ambassador that “we will not be misled, whether it is about arrest warrants for me or the arrest of elected officials of the court by the Russian Federation, and whether it is about other elected officials in another jurisdiction.”
Khan said the ICC aims to be “deaf to the noise” and that this should be a time “when the law can breathe,” whether on global crises such as Ukraine, Gaza and the Palestinians, Libya or the Rohingya Muslim minority in the country. Myanmar.
“We have a duty to stand up for justice, to stand up for the victims,” Khan said. “We will stand up and apply the law with integrity and independence.”