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
    228·
    6 months ago

    Burying the lead…

    That investigation, launched in 2021, culminated last week when Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, announced that he was seeking an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the country’s conduct in its war in Gaza.

    The investigation the lead up to Karim Khan seeking an arrest warrant started in 2021? Do they have psychics working there? Probably more likely they’ve wanted to do this for a long time, they were just looking for a reason.

    The ICC is burning a lot of credibility here. So how much can we believe these “alleged” unsourced statements, especially considering it’s from The Guardian which has had an anti-Israel bias for decades?

    • livus@kbin.social
      12·
      6 months ago

      If you read the articles on this, the timeline makes sense. No one has to be “psychic”.

      • In 2015 Palestine applied to join the ICC.

      • Mossad’s harassment of the ICC’s chief prosecutor seems to have begun straight after that.

      • Israel was already breaching international law with the settlements and flouting of the Geneva Conventions, and had been accused of war crimes in e.g. 2014.

      If an entity is repeatedly accused of committing crimes it’s not really some crazy conspiracy if prosecutors start taking an interest in their activities. And the more they escalate their criminal activity the more likely it is that an investigation and eventual warrant will follow.

      • 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.