International lawyers believe conduct of Israeli intelligence service should be investigated by prosecutor in The Hague

Efforts by Israel’s intelligence agencies to undermine and influence the international criminal court (ICC) could amount to “offences against the administration of justice” and should be investigated by its chief prosecutor, legal experts have said.

Responding to revelations about Israeli surveillance and espionage operations against the ICC, multiple leading international law experts said the conduct of Israeli intelligence services could amount to criminal offences.

The disclosures about Israel’s nine-year campaign against the court were published on Tuesday as part of a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. It details how the country’s intelligence agencies were deployed to surveil, hack, put pressure on, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff.

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  • SpaceCowboyEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    Justice isn’t supposed to be because of a grudge against a country for past shenanigans. That’s simply not how the law is supposed to work.

    In a proper legal system when an officer of the court has a conflict of interest (like when they’ve had negative interactions with someone in the past) they’re supposed to recuse themselves from the process.

    The reason for this is simple. You don’t want there to even be the appearance of impropriety in a legal system.

    As it stands now we can’t be sure that the ICC is trying to prosecute based on the merits of the evidence or if it’s based on a grudge due to things that happened in the past. Are we prosecuting things that have happened in the last six months or is the goal to get revenge for something Mossad did years ago? We can’t really be certain now, which is a loss of credibility for the ICC.

    My understanding is Khan has only applied for prosecution of Netanyahu and Gallant. The Judge that needs to approve this now has to decide whether to overlook the conflict of interest (and hurt the credibility of the Court) or deny it which will upset a lot of people, but preserve whatever credibility the court still has left.

    Ultimately this is a political stunt. Netanyahu and Gallant will not be arrested. And the ICC has no capability of arresting the Hamas members they also mentioned to create a false equivalency. It’s very likely even Israel can arrest the Hamas members (they will likely die before surrendering) but even if they did, Israel would prosecute them for their crimes before handing them over to the ICC. So it’s all a political stunt to make those involved famous and will not have a positive outcome. More the opposite, it furthers an “us against the world” mentality in Israel which only makes a negotiated ceasefire less likely which means more Palestinians will die.

    If this were a real prosecution, they’d wait until the war was over before trying initiate these kinds of proceedings. But the ICC is currently trying to act more like an executive arm of international law rather than a judiciary. They’re overstepping and will be ignored. And the ICC being ignored now only makes it more likely the ICC will be ignored in the future. Which is a bad thing.