The Duran Podcast
ICC (Int'l Criminal Court) is finished
All right, Alexander, let's talk about the ICC, the International Criminal Court, and the threats being made to the ICC by Congress with Republicans and Democrats. They are threatening the ICC, Israel is threatening the ICC, and all of this comes from an NBC news report which claims that the ICC is going to or was, was about to issue arrest warrants to Netanyahu as well as other top Israeli officials. And this is upset to the United States, the Biden White House, the State Department, Republicans, Democrats, and of course, the Israeli government quite, quite a change from a year ago when the ICC was being praised for its arrest warrant issued against Russian President Vladimir Putin because Putin decided to save children. Interesting. Anyway, what are your thoughts? Well, there's an awful lot one could say about this affair. Firstly, I think it's worth saying that the ICC have not themselves said that they were about to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials. But then one wouldn't expect them to confirm it before the arrest warrants themselves were issued. I mean, if one doesn't issue arrest warrants and then tell the person you want to arrest days in advance, well, actually, we're looking to arrest you. That isn't the way it's done. The point is they haven't denied it. They didn't deny that they had the plan to issue the arrest warrants. And as you said, it started with that one story in the American media, but the Israeli media are full of it and they're apparently getting lots of confirmation from all the usual sources and we don't know what those sources are, but all the people of the Hague. So it looks as if the ICC is or was very close to that decision to issue those arrest warrants. Now, the ICC has been very embarrassed by the whole Gaza affair because, of course, as you rightly said, they indicted Putin last year. That was put in mildly legally dubious. It was all about, you know, taking children out of war zone as has been confirmed by Western newspapers, including the Guardian, when the parents of those children contact the Russian authorities so far, as I understand it, hasn't been a single case when a child has not been returned to its parents. So it was an absurd, in my opinion, it was an absurd indictment. We now have had this terrible fighting going on in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, a much older, far more established court than the ICC, has accepted that there are grounds to think that a potential genocide or intention to commit a genocide is being committed in Gaza. For many years now, lots of countries, especially in Africa, have been complaining that the ICC has been working in effect as a tool for Western interests. So there was lots of criticism, lots of pressure on the ICC. Why are you taking no action? Why are you sitting on your hands when this horror in Gaza is playing out? So it looks as if, finally, they decided that they had no choice but to issue those arrest warrants. And this has massively embarrassed Western governments, and of course, it infuriated many people in Israel and in the United States. So what is now happening, and it is equally embarrassing and utterly destructive of the credibility of the ICC, if it succeeds, is that there is now a political campaign to get the ICC to reverse this decision. So firstly, we've had these threats from Congress that Congress will sanction the ICC if it goes ahead with this step. Then we've had reports that the Biden administration is trying to put its own pressure on the ICC not to go ahead with this step. He's claiming that the ICC has no jurisdiction to issue arrest warrants against Israel, presumably on the basis that Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute. But of course, Russia also has not ratified the Rome Statute, and jurisdiction was not a problem there, but apparently it is in this case. In fact, the ICC can argue that it has jurisdiction in the Israel case, because the Palestinian Authority has ratified and joined the Rome Statute. And it is the authority which supposedly, its authority supposedly also extends to Gaza as well, and of course, to the West Bank. So you can argue, the ICC can argue, that since war crimes are apparently being committed on territory, Palestinian territory, with the Palestinians having exceeded to the Rome Statute, that they do have jurisdiction. Now, you know, I'm not going to push this. I'm not the, you know, the person who is expert in this field at all. But anyway, you could see that there is an argument there, and the key point is the Russians hadn't ratified the Rome Statute, neither has Ukraine, by the way. But jurisdiction was not a problem with the Russians, but apparently it is a problem according to the Americans with Israel instead. So that's the Biden administration. But now we're getting from Axios, which remember is very close to the Biden administration. Apparently warnings, warnings that the Israelis have conveyed to the US, that if there are arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials, Israel will retaliate by taking action to collapse the Palestinian Authority, entirely choking off its tax revenue, perhaps taking even further measures. And that Israel is blaming the Palestinian Authority for the fact that the ICC is apparently going to make this decision, is on the brink of making this decision. So we see threats, pressure, all of that being exerted now, semi publicly against the ICC to reverse a decision, which most of the world wants to see. Now, you know, if the ICC crumbles, which by the way, I think more likely than not it will, but if it crumbles and, you know, doesn't issue these arrest warrants now, then I think most of the world are going to say to themselves, the ICC is a bust. It does what the West tells it to do. The West is absolutely open about the fact that it exerts pressure on it. The Americans have threatened it with publicly threatened with sanctions. The US government has told it that it doesn't have jurisdiction. When perhaps it does, we've had all of these threats from Israel as well. So this isn't really an independent impartial court in any meaningful sense. It is a tool of the US and when it has briefly shown a flicker of independence, it's been cuduled into submission. I cannot imagine that most countries in the world, even many countries that have ratified the Rome Statute, are going to take it seriously from this point onwards. If, as I'd rather expect, it backs down. What if it doesn't back down? Well, if it doesn't back down. First of all, it's important to say that the US, the Biden administration, massively embarrassed. We've had protests in the US already. We've had all those protests in the universities. We've had these scenes that we're not going to talk about today in Columbia University, everybody knows about them. We have massive unease within the grassroots of the Democratic Party. All of this on the eve of an election and on the eve of the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, we're apparently feeling on this issue is running particularly strong. So Americans embarrassed by this. They're also going to be very embarrassed in their discussions with some of their Middle East allies and around the world. The Europeans, the level of embarrassment there is going to be of any entirely different order of magnitude because the European countries have been enthusiastic supporters of the indictment against Putin. They've been telling all these countries around the world that they must, since if they've ratified the Rome statute that they must enforce that indictment, so if Putin arrives in their countries, they must arrest him even though many countries around the world don't want to do that. Anyway, that's what they've been saying. And now they would have indictments against Netanyahu and other Israeli officials over a war that their European publics are much angrier about than they are about war in Ukraine. So what do they do? I mean, as I said, the levels of embarrassment would be off the scale. And I don't know what they would do. I don't know what Ursula von der Leyen is going to do, given, remember what she said when she went to Israel in October, how did they pull back from all of that? How does the British government and the Labour opposition pull back from all their statements about Israel that had been made in the United Kingdom if the ICC makes this decision? So they are going to be massively embarrassed, and then, of course, if the Israelis and the Americans act on all their various threats against the ICC, the US imposes sanctions upon it, the Israelis act to destroy the Palestinian Authority, then again, I mean, this escalates the conflict in Gaza in the most disastrous ways, I mean, can the ICC function at all if it's sanctioned by the United States? Do the Europeans abide by those American sanctions? You know, the ICC is based on the Hague, and if the Palestinian Authority is destroyed so that the Palestinians no longer have effective governance, how do you even pretend, continue the pretense that you're working towards establish a two-state solution? How do you tell the Saudis, for example, that you want a two-state solution and persuade them, given the stance that the Saudis have taken, to agree to establish diplomatic relations with Israel? It would be a political, diplomatic, geopolitical disaster. So that's why I think that every single, you know, wire is going to be pulled, every single threat is going to be made to prevent the ICC issuing those warrants. Better destroy the credibility of the ICC, you'd still be there, you can still pretend that it's a real tool, then face the disaster that the issue of those warrants and the likely reaction to them would be. Of course, the politicians are going to save their own skin, so they'll let the ICC implode, and then that's what's going to happen. Absolutely. No one's going to take the ICC seriously. Absolutely. That's the inevitable outcome of all of this, and some people may argue and say, you know, they may argue the point, the ICC deserved this because they have been abusing, yeah, they've been abusing their, maybe not even abusing is the right word, they've been compromised for many years. Going all the way back to maybe Yugoslavia, Serbia? Yeah. Well indeed, I mean, is that fair to say, they've been abused, they've been compromised for a long time. They've been at all of the West for many, many decades. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, this affair is exposing that fact in a way that no one can, you know, deny and which cannot be concealed, but that is what they always have been, and basically ever since their foundation, their credibility has been gradually draining away. So I mean, this, you know, it's probably no bad thing, if I have to say it frankly. If this discredited institution finally implodes and is, you know, taken off the scene, it will be a clarifying moment. It would demonstrate the realities of where power is and of how power works in the modern world. It would also, I have to say this, be a further example of the rules-based international order in action. I mean, who makes the rules? What are those rules? Whatever people in Washington decide. Those are the only rules that really matter, as far as they can say. But it would be, as I said, a further example of this. And that, you know, better have that clarifying moment than continue to drag on the fiction that this organization or institution actually exists. Even if those warrants are released, are issued, be massively embarrassing, but I still can't honestly believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is at any time in his life going to find himself on trial in The Hague. I just don't believe it's going to happen. Yeah, I discredited ICC. It'll remain. I think you're right. It'll be there. It'll be at The Hague. It'll be staffed with a bunch of bureaucrats, technocrats, judges, whatever, but no one's going to take it seriously. I wonder if that would allow Putin to start traveling to wherever he wants, because most countries, for example, out of South Africa, let's just say South Africa, because we had the whole incident with South Africa in Putin six months ago or a year ago. I wonder if the signal would be, you know, the ICC is such a joke. Yeah, Putin come to South Africa for our next meeting. Just throwing out the key player now is Brazil, because the Brazil is apparently going to host the next. I think it's a G20 meeting. Brazil. And Brazil has ratified the Rome statute. Lula has made it very clear that he wants Putin to come to Brazil, so it would make it much easier, I think, for both Lula and Putin to come to Brazil. In his hands. Exactly. And because this would be such, the institution would be so completely discredited from this point on which, I mean, it would, I mean, nobody would take it seriously anymore. It's authority. Yeah, the United States that, yeah, the State Department, I'm sure, if we get to that point, I'm sure the State Department would say, oh, you know, there's all asked to arrest Putin because of Brazil. But Lula can easily say, yeah, whatever. And everything that happened with the ICC and with the Netanyahu, you guys have no standing whatsoever. Absolutely. It's a little bit to arrest or whatever. Exactly. You know, the Brazilians anyway would have a legal argument. They could say they can't arrest Putin because as a head of state, he has sovereign state immunity and all that. So you know, it's not as if legal arguments not to execute an arrest warrant don't exist. But beyond that, as I said, there will be no enthusiasm to put it mildly or or desire to execute on an arrest warrant from a completely discredited organization. All right, let's see how all of this plays out. What an interesting story. Oh, you heard an interesting story. Yeah. It is absolutely. Yeah, there's an awful lot about the world, the nature of the world, the actual nature of the world and what, you know, the values that Secretary Blinken constantly talks about are really all about and what the rules based international order really is. There we go. The Duran dot locals.com we are on rumble odyssey, but you telegram rock fin and Twitter X and go to the Duran shop. Look for limited edition merch. The link is in the description box down below. [MUSIC]