US House votes to advance bill to sanction ICC over Israel arrest warrants

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Friday January 10, 2025

In May, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant [Piroschka van de Wouw/Reuters]

The United States House of Representatives has voted in favour of a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) in retaliation for its arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

Legislators in the lower chamber of the US Congress passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” by an overwhelming margin, 243 to 140, on Thursday in a signal of strong support for Israel.

Forty-five Democrats joined 198 Republicans in backing the bill. No Republicans voted against it.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where a Republican majority was sworn in earlier this month.

The legislation proposes sanctions for any foreigner who helps the ICC in its attempts to investigate, detain or prosecute a US citizen or citizen of an allied country that does not recognise the authority of the court.

Neither the US nor Israel are parties to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC.

The sanctions would include the freezing of property assets, as well as the denial of visas to any foreigners who materially or financially contribute to the court’s efforts.

“America is passing this law because a kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally, Israel,” Representative Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a speech before Thursday’s vote.

The vote, one of the first since the new Congress was seated last week, underscored strong support among President-elect Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans for Israel’s government, despite its ongoing war in Gaza.

That conflict has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since it began in October 2023, many of them women and children. United Nations experts have denounced Israel’s methods in Gaza as “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”.

That prompted ICC prosecutors last May to issue the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.

In response, US legislators threatened retaliation against the ICC. In a letter sent to outgoing US President Joe Biden in May, dozens of human rights groups urged him to reject calls for punitive action.

“Acting on these calls would do grave harm to the interests of all victims globally and to the US government’s ability to champion human rights and the cause of justice,” the groups wrote at the time.

This week, another group of human rights organisations issued another letter ahead of Thursday’s vote, denouncing the House bill as an attack on an “independent judicial institution”.

Sanctioning the court, they wrote, will “jeopardize the ability of desperate victims across all the court’s investigations to access justice, weaken the credibility of sanction tools in other contexts, and place the United States at odds with its closest allies”.

The letter warned that imposing “asset freezes and entry restrictions” on ICC allies would bring the US “the stigma of siding with impunity over justice”.

Nevertheless, the US Senate, under Majority Leader John Thune, has promised swift consideration of the act so Trump can sign it into law after he takes office on January 20.

In 2020, during his first term in office, Trump sanctioned senior ICC leaders over the court’s investigations of US crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in occupied Palestinian territory. President Biden later lifted those sanctions.

The ICC, based in The Hague, is a permanent court that can prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.

The State of Palestine has been a member since 2015, and the court first announced an investigation of crimes committed there by both Israeli and Hamas officials in 2019.

Though Israel is not party to the ICC, the court has jurisdiction over crimes committed on a member state’s territory, regardless of the nationality of those committing them.

The US has supported the court at times, for instance, when the ICC’s top prosecutor sought an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Russia, like Israel and the US, is not a member of the court.

Karim Khan, the prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant against Netanyahu and Gallant, has said that his decision is in line with the court’s approach in all its cases, and he indicated that the warrants could prevent ongoing crimes.

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