Republicans Threaten the ICC
Twelve Republican Senators have signed a letter threatening the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and the court itself with "severe sanctions" and barring all court members and associates from traveling to the United States.
These threats are connected to a demand that the ICC stop its investigation into potential war crimes committed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials against the Palestinian people during the war in Gaza.
Our nation routinely espouses the importance of law and order as paramount to a respectable and honest society, making this attack a disgrace.
And yet, this isn’t the first time Republicans have attacked the court or applied sanctions against the institution.
America was one of the countries that worked on the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court. However, once it was finished, the US was one of only seven nations not to sign on.
The others were:
China
Iraq
Israel
Libya
Qatar
Yemen
America was concerned that the ICC would come after our military and politicians for war crimes. The exact issue the court was created to address.
Congress even went as far as passing legislation called the Armed Service Members Protection Act which heavily limits how much the US can help or interact with the ICC and prevents any non-NATO country that we provide military aid to from ever handing over US personnel to the ICC.
This legislation, which was signed into law under George W. Bush, is so extreme that it authorizes the President to send our military to invade the Netherlands (the ICC is located in Hague) in order to “protect” our military personnel, officials, and allies from prosecution or detainment. That is why the law is also called the Hague Invasion Act.
This law is what the group of Republican Senators is now casually threatening the ICC with if the court proceeds with filing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu or other Israeli officials.
In the past, the ICC opened investigations against the US for potential war crimes in Afghanistan. The crimes being investigated were that prisoners had been tortured while detained by the US military.
Dozens of these former prisoners came forward to testify about their brutal treatment. One claim is that two prisoners were beaten to death by US interrogators while chained to the ceiling in a standing position.
These claims of torture and abuse are in addition to the multitude of reports that US drone strikes killed civilians and even humanitarian workers when no enemy combatants were in the vicinity.
Under President Trump, the US response to this investigation was to condemn and sanction the court while claiming the US committed no crimes.
At the time, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that the United States has a good track record of investigating and prosecuting the alleged criminal actions of its own service members and that the International Criminal Court should stay out of U.S. business.
Now that the ICC is investigating Netanyahu and other Israeli officials for war crimes in Gaza, America finds itself once again attempting to shut down an international investigation by a court designed to make sure that atrocities do not go unpunished.
The United States should welcome a thorough investigation. We should respect the rule of law and want it to be upheld. However, when it comes to America or our closest allies, we continue to believe that any action we take is justified simply because of who we are. That is how kings and dictators act, not a democratic society.
Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. The majority of those deaths have been women and children. Palestinians are actively starving, with 1/3rd of the population in Gaza already facing the highest levels of extreme hunger, and over 1 million will hit that threshold soon.
This war has been a catastrophe for the Palestinian civilians who are not part of Hamas and who have taken no part in any of the fighting or terrorism.
Despite all of this, Israel is now preparing an invasion into the city of Rafah in their efforts to clear out the last remaining Hamas battalions. But that city is also where over 1 million Palestinian civilians have been displaced due to the fighting and bombings that the rest of the Gaza Strip has already faced.
Israel told those civilians to evacuate to the North. There aren’t suitable places to evacuate to in the North due to the destruction caused by the war. There isn’t food. There isn’t enough water. There aren’t enough places to attempt to live and survive.
This is exactly when an international court should be investigating a war, investigating officials, and investigating the leader of the nation that has ordered the war to be carried out in this way.
The United States needs to stay out of the way of the ICC and neither interfere with these investigations nor threaten the court for doing its job.
Above all of that, the US needs to reconcile with our own misdeeds and war crimes of the past in order to finally join the International Court. A court that matches the principles of our nation and gives a path to justice for the world that doesn’t involve more wars or more crimes.
America is not always right.
https://jacobin.com/2024/02/pentagon-war-crimes-records-drones-terror
