Paris, 22 May 2024
“When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established by the Rome Statute in 1998, we believed that its role would reflect the work of the late Simon Wiesenthal, to prosecute war criminals,” stated now Emeritus Director for International Relations of the Wiesenthal Centre, D. Shimon Samuels.
Samuels argued, “Sadly, the ICC pre-trial ruling against Israel showed that yet another United Nations-related institution has been infected by political bias as an instrument for Palestinian denial of Jewish sovereignty.”
“The United States and Israel never joined the ICC, foreseeing themselves placed in the dock,” stated Samuels, adding, “This became a reality when ‘Palestine’ joined the Rome Statute in June 2014 and launched a series of communications to manipulate the Court into targeting Israel, despite the ‘non-State, non-sovereign and non-defined borders’ Palestinian status.”
Samuels stressed, “The United States, as a non-member party – just as Israel on ‘Palestine’ – had been attacked for alleged crimes in Afghanistan in a session attended by the then Wiesenthal Centre, as ‘amicus curiae’ in those proceedings.”
Samuels with Dr Dov Jacobs, based in the Hague, and London Barrister
Joshua Kern QC, the two ICC experts who argued against the capacity
of the ICC to exercise jurisdiction in the case of non-State Parties
(photo CSW-Europe, December 2019).
The CSW called for “joint action to be taken if an eventual ICC investigation would ever result in arrest warrants for the detention of Israeli or American senior officials, when travelling abroad.”
The Court however stated that “potential consequences that might arise from the present decision are outside the scope of the Chamber’s mandate.”
“In the current context, the ICC must be deemed accountable for encouraging the Palestinian ‘leadership’ and people to believe that peace negotiations are unnecessary, and that the more vicious the terrorist violence, the more likely it is for the legitimate response to be charged by the Courts.”
“Indeed, this is what has happened: a group of States, led by the South African current antisemitic Government, and the ICC Prosecutor is calling for the application of arrest warrants, thus placing the Jewish State on the level of the terrorists of Hamas.”
“As a French-based organization, we turn to President Macron for powerful measures to counter this travesty, lest France be charged for its operations against terrorism in North Africa, or for its response to violence in French territories overseas,” concluded Samuels.
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