#icc arrest warrants

[agentfascinateur]

The US trying to interfere with an ongoing ICC investigation:

Netanyahu, who is extremely nervous about the possible arrest warrants, spoke to several Republican and Democratic senators in recent days and asked them to press the ICC prosecutor not to move forward with issuing arrest warrants.

[immaculatasknight]

The clock is ticking

[huariqueje]

A Panel of Experts in International Law convened by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan KC, today announced its conclusions. The Panel was established at the Prosecutor’s request in support of his investigation into the ‘Situation in the State of Palestine’, which covers international crimes committed either on the territory of Palestine or by a Palestinian national. The Panel’s mandate was to advise the Prosecutor on whether his applications for arrest warrants met the standard provided in Article 58 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The Panel members unanimously endorsed the Prosecutor’s assessment that the Court had jurisdiction over the case and that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that individuals named in the arrest warrants — including senior leaders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the Court.

-Amal Clooney and Marko Milanovic

[readingsquotes]

"When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”

...Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.

..

Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people.

...

Hacked emails and monitored calls

Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance.

Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices.

“If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”. ......

One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials.

Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations.

“It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.”

...

Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber.

They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded.

[thoughtlessarse]

 The U.K. government has reversed its opposition to the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Friday marked the deadline to submit documents as part of a legal challenge against the ICC, a date which had been extended due to the U.K. general election and change of government earlier this month. “We’ve been very clear about the importance of the rule of law and the independence of the courts both domestically and internationally,” a spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. “And our position on this process matter is that it is for the courts and prosecutor to decide and that’s why we’ve not taken forward plans put forward by the previous government,” the spokesperson said. The decision marks a contrast to the previous Conservative government, who requested the court provide written observations on whether it “can exercise jurisdiction over Israeli nationals” given the Palestinian Authority cannot exercise criminal jurisdiction over Israeli nationals. The Conservatives did not submit a full objection before the election.

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The second good thing the Tory-lites have done since taking office, the first being the appointment of James Timpson as The Minister of State for Prisons, Parole and Probation.

The US' gonna be pissed off!

[blueiscoool]

ICC Issues Arrest Warrant for Vladimir Putin

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, a member of Putin's government, it announced in a news release Friday.

Lvova-Belova is the official at the center of the alleged scheme to forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia.

The ICC said both Putin and Lvova-Belova are “allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation."

Some key background: According to the US and several European governments, Putin's administration has carried out a scheme to forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, often to a network of dozens of camps, where the minors undergo political reeducation.

“Lvova-Belova’s efforts specifically include the forced adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families, the so-called ‘patriotic education’ of Ukrainian children, legislative changes to expedite the provision of Russian Federation citizenship to Ukrainian children, and the deliberate removal of Ukrainian children by Russia’s forces,” the US Treasury said in September.

Her government title is commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the Russian President.

The ICC statement Friday said there are "reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes," both for having committed the acts directly or through others in his command, and for "his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates."

Russia has characterized reports of forcible relocation as “absurd” and said it does its “best” to keep minors with their families.

The ICC announcement comes just days after several US news outlets reported the court was planning to open two war crimes cases tied to the invasion of Ukraine and issue arrest warrants against “several people." According to the New York Times, the ICC was set to first open a case on Russia’s alleged abduction of Ukrainian children. Then a second case would focus on Moscow “unrelentingly” targeting civilian infrastructure, including water supplies and gas tanks.

The cases would represent the first international charges to be brought since the start of Russia’s war and come after months of work by special ICC investigation teams, according to the NYT.

[plethoraworldatlas]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly growing increasingly concerned that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for him and other top government officials for committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

The Times of Israelreported Sunday that the Israeli government, in partnership with the U.S., is "making a concerted effort to head off" possible arrest warrants from the ICC, which first launched its war crimes investigation in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2021.

Israel does not recognize the ICC's jurisdiction and has refused to cooperate with the probe. The ICC says it has jurisdiction over Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Citing an unnamed Israeli government source, The Times of Israel reported that "a major focus of the ICC allegations will be that Israel 'deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza.'" Other officials who could face arrest warrants are Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.

The Times of Israel's reporting came shortly after Israeli journalist Ben Caspit wrote that Netanyahu is "under unusual stress" over the possibility of arrest warrants and is leading a "nonstop push over the telephone" to forestall ICC action.

Like Israel, the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 2002. The legal body is tasked with investigating individuals, not governments.

The U.S., Israel's leading arms supplier, has opposed the ICC's Palestine investigation from the start, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying in a 2021 statement that the court "has no jurisdiction over this matter" because "Israel is not a party to the ICC."

But the Biden administration vocally supported the ICC's decision to issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over war crimes committed in Ukraine, even though neither Russia nor Ukraine are parties to the Rome Statute.

[head-post]

ICC postpones decision on arrest of Israeli officials

The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Pre-Trial Tribunal postponed on Thursday the process of deciding whether to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Jerusalem Post reports.

The postponement came after England filed a “friend of the court” application against the ICC’s jurisdiction over the matter on June 10. Thursday’s decision not only granted Britain’s request to intervene, but also gave other countries the right to intervene in advance. The ICC gave England and other countries until July 12 to file their briefs.

Moreover, the ICC said their briefs and the entire deliberative process could be made public, even though the procedure for issuing an arrest warrant is usually kept secret so as not to alarm the suspect.

The three-judge panel ruled:

Whilst the following must not be understood as an open call by the Chamber for amicus curiae submissions, the Chamber acknowledges that the Request, and the Chamber’s decision to grant the United Kingdom leave to file observations, may result in other requests to submit observations. To limit the impact of this procedure on the expeditiousness of the present stage of the proceedings, the Chamber indicates already in the present decision that any such requests pursuant to rule 103(1) of the Rules must also be received by July 12 2024.

ICC prosecutor Karim Asad Ahmad Khan requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Galant on May 20, accusing them of involvement in the destruction of Gaza Strip residents and causing them severe suffering. In addition, Khan requested arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders. According to the ICC prosecutor, the country has every right to self-defence and the return of hostages, but no one has a “licence” to commit war crimes.

Read more HERE

[agentfascinateur]

86 House Democrats say there is evidence Israel is failing to comply with the US Foreign Assistance Act

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democratic-lawmakers-tell-biden-evidence-shows-israel-is-restricting-gaza-aid-2024-05-03/

But Schumer is still inviting Netanyahu to address Congress 🤦🏻‍♀️

[news4dzhozhar]

ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Hamas officials | Israel War on Gaza News

[workersolidarity]

Watch "The Grayzone exposes shoddy ICC warrant against Putin" on YouTube

This one takes the cake.

I would say these are the most farcical charges I've ever seen, but they're being presented concurrently with the roll out of the Trump indictment, another farcical set of politically motivated charges.

The ICC Warrant accuses President Putin and his Director of Children's Welfare, Maria Llova-Belova, of literally kidnapping 16'000 Ukrainian children and forcing them against their will into a network of reeducation institutions spread across the Russian Federation "that stretches from the Black Sea all the way to the Pacific Coast" in order to retrain them and indoctrinate them into Russian ethnic and Nationalist views and even give them military training, describing the children as "hostages," though no evidence for this is provided.

The author of the report, Nathaniel Raymond even went on TV on CNN's Anderson Cooper's show and declared this was tantamount to genocide, connecting Putin's actions to Hitler's Nazi Germany.

These wild accusations are all based on a report conducted by an organization at Yale called the Humanitarian Research Lab, headed by Nathaniel Raymond which was in-turn funded openly by the US State Dept who contracted the Lab for the report and provided the HRL Team with access to Pentagon Satellites.

The report's authors conducted no ground investigation, no direct interviews, nor did they even request access to the sites in question, instead relying on Pentagon satellite imagery, similar to early fake investigations into the supposed Chinese Uyghur Camps. And it even appears that the State Dept contacted Yale's HRL and requested they form an investigative team two weeks before the Russian SMO began.

Nathaniel Raymond even admits in an interview that HRL was originally focused on Human Rights abuses in Afghanistan until they were pressured into investigating Russia by the State Dept two weeks before the beginning of the SMO.

In the HRL Report, the authors reference Russian news articles but appear to have used Google to translate the articles rather than an actual in-house translator. This despite being fully funded by the State Dept and Yale University, two sources for endless propaganda funds. They then chose to exclude actual testimony in those articles that quote the children from the program happily discussing how much they enjoyed the experience.

But the biggest and most obvious flaw in the narrative being pushed by the US and NATO in conjunction with the ICC is the fact that these are NOT in fact ethnic Ukrainian children being shipped off and retrained in Russian Nationalism.

That's not even remotely close to the truth.

These are children from families in Eastern Ukraine, specifically the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, suffering terribly under the weight of the war, who largely identify as ethnic Russians, speak Russian, and desperately want to get their children away from the frontlines: away from falling rockets and shells, away from the extreme poverty and destitution taking hold in Ukraine, away from the political corruption, away from the persecution against Russian speaking Ukrainians, and away from the economic and food access disruptions that have made life in Eastern Ukraine Hell for 9 years.

According to one violin instructor at a camp, many if not most of the children have lost a house, some have lost relatives and friends, and they cannot continue their musical instruction back home where only remote learning is possible. And even that is not always possible.

The report even concedes the children are participating in these cultural camps with direct parental consent and were returned to their families when they said they would be.

As for the facilities themselves, you don't have to believe me, believe the author of the report, Nathaniel Raymond who described the institutions as basically "teddy bears" at one point in an interview.

And according to the Yale HRL and the State Department's own paper:

"There is no documentation of child mistreatment, including sexual or physical violence, among the camps referenced in this report."

And of course there isn't.

These are NOT "reeducation camps" and ZERO evidence exists of ANY political training going on, of ANY kind, at ANY of the camps.

These are cultural institutions that offer music instruction and other artistic and scholastic outlets for these children to express themselves in a safe environment, without the fear of rockets and shells falling overhead. Children are brought, once again with the consent of their parents, to these educational and cultural facilities for an agreed upon period of time, usually a matter of a few days or weeks, and they are promptly returned to their families on time.

Most of these programs center around music or the arts and parents send their children to these facilities free of charge. The children are escorted safely into the Russian mainland, riding trains or busses where they get to observe beautiful lands and environments along the way. It is truly an escape for these children.

Some parents said they sent their children to the camp because they wanted to take advantage of a free trip for their child. Some hoped to protect their children from ongoing fighting, taking advantage of intact sanitation and nutritious food inaccessible from home. While others just wanted their children to enjoy a vacation at a time when few outlets for children exist in their hometowns.

The facilities themselves are described as generous: children are well fed and taken care of (something that's been difficult in war time), they get playtime, music instruction, therapy and schooling. Most of the children come from VERY low income families, badly affected by the war. Some are literally war refugees.

Therefore these people at the ICC, in the US Govt, and at NATO are basically demanding Russia return these children to Ukraine, into a war zone, where they can be brought into Western Ukraine, accused of being collaborators by the SBU, or returned to homes that no longer exist and are still under fire.

And again, I just can't stress this enough:

The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab conducted NO on the ground reporting, conducted NO interviews, and DID NOT request access to the facilities housing these camps.

Read more about this ridiculous facade here:

It's truly astonishing just how far the US is willing to go to damage Russia.

Even the ICC itself has fallen under the weight of US Foreign Policy.

The US, like Russia, is NOT a member of the ICC and has actively fought its investigations over the years, imposing sanctions on the Court a few years ago, and even going so far as to pass what's known as the "Hague Invasion Act" aka the American Service-Members' Protection Act, that literally threatens to invade the Netherlands should the ICC ever detain American service members for War Crimes.

But as a Pro-Western leadership has recently gained control at the ICC, the US has found use in the Court once again as yet another tool for damaging Russia on the international stage.

Watch Journalist Jeremy Loffredo visit one of these camps in this video

[louisdotmp3]

btw when u talk about the icc and israel u should know that they were one of the 7 countries that voted against the rome statute specifically because, "the action of transferring population into occupied territory" was included in the list of war crimes

[readingsquotes]

"Over the years, the U.S. Government has regularly trotted out the argument that justice processes — ICJ cases, ICC allegations, even arguments over the legality of settlements — somehow interfere with a political process. Typically other states in the G7 have avoided these kinds of arguments, which frankly, I think are absurd, evidence-free arguments that serve to protect a peace process that does not exist and has not existed for about twenty years. 

The United States has convinced itself that law and accountability are antithetical to peace and conflict resolution. It’s an extremely Washington-oriented view of the Middle East and of the global movement for international justice. And it’s extremely sad, if you ask me, since the United States was such a leader in the establishment of the main pre-ICC institutions of international justice — the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, and the war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, not to mention a few other “hybrid” tribunals in places like Cambodia and Sierra Leone."

[thoughtlessarse]

Chief prosecutor Karim Khan urged a panel of ICC pretrial judges to “urgently render its decisions” on the warrant requests he filed in May for Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders, two of whom have since been killed. The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor called on judges to "urgently" rule on his request for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others linked to the Israel-Hamas war, saying the court has jurisdiction. “It is settled law that the Court has jurisdiction in this situation,” Prosecutor Karim Khan wrote in a 49-page legal brief. Khan called on a panel of ICC pretrial judges to “urgently render its decisions” on the requests he filed in May for warrants for Netanyahu, his defense minister, Yoav Gallant and three leaders of Hamas, two of whom have since been killed. The brief filed by Khan came in response to legal arguments filed by dozens of countries, academics, victims' groups and rights groups either rejecting or supporting the court’s power to issue arrest warrants in its investigation into the war in Gaza and the October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel. In his May request for arrest warrants, Khan accused Netanyahu, Gallant and three Hamas leaders — Yehya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip and Israel.

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