LAST week, President Donald Trump sanctioned the international Criminal Court (ICC) and its judges for its prejudicial persecution of Israel. Predictably Trump’s action has provoked hysteria among the world’s woke leaders and commentariat. Yawn. We have been here before.
In December 2019 the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, a Muslim Gambian lawyer, started an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israel and by Hamas in Palestine. It focused on the 2014 Israel-Palestine war that followed the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths. For her attack on Israel Bensouda was sanctioned by Trump.
Bensouda’s successor Karim Khan, also a Muslim, went one step further. In May 2024 Khan filed warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes allegedly committed from October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, killed 1,195 Israel civilians and took 251 hostages. Khan was not sanctioned by then President Joe Biden.
ICC apologists suggest that the court showed its even-handedness by simultaneously issuing arrest warrants for Hamas’s leaders. The ICC thereby disgracefully implied a moral equivalence between the actions of a designated terrorist organisation, Hamas, and those of the Middle-East’s only functioning democracy, Israel. Really? And the ICC expect to be taken seriously?
Even Biden, needing to hedge the Democrats’ support for Israel because of the extreme left-wing, anti-Semitic factions of his party, responded by declaring: ‘Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.’
The investigation itself is legally problematic. Israel is not a party to the Statute of Rome (1998) which established the ICC. How the ICC claims legal authority over countries that have not signed up to its charter remains a mystery. A logical claim it is not.
The dubious logic of being able to investigate non-signatories to the ICC was summed up by President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, when he said that the ICC‘unacceptably threatens American sovereignty and US national security interests, [because the prosecutor] claims essentially unfettered discretion to investigate, charge, and prosecute individuals, regardless of whether their countries have acceded to the Rome Statute’.
Bolton’s summary exposes the ‘legitimacy’ problem of the ICC. As of January 2025, it comprises 125 member states. However, only 96 of these have ratified the Statute of Rome. A further 41 states remain completely outside the ICC. The world’s five most populous countries, which account for nearly 50 per cent of the world population, are not members of the ICC, viz India, China, the US, Indonesia and Pakistan; nor is Russia.
The anti-Jewish bias of the international legal establishment reflects not only their socialist leanings – I have never met an international legal expert who is not a socialist – but also the preponderance of Muslim representation. This is not surprising given that there are 53 Muslim countries and 1.9billion Muslims versus Israel and just 15million Jews.
So who are the ICC prosecutors who initiated these questionable warrants? Fatou Bensouda, daughter of a landowner and wrestling entrepreneur, comes from a well-connected Gambian family. One might have thought that the fact that she is a Muslim would make her ineligible to act in a case involving Israel. Did Bensouda not consider that recusing herself would be appropriate?
It could also be asked why the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties, which is responsible for the governance of the court, allowed Bensouda to participate in the investigation of Israel despite her conflicts of interest. Her successor, Karim Khan, a British jurist, is similarly compromised by his Muslim faith.
That Muslim prosecutors have been allowed to lead prosecutions against Israel points to at best a failure of ICC’s governance and at worst a religious and political bias. In this respect the ICC Assembly has singularly failed.
Bensouda, who is now the Gambian High Commissioner to the UK, has held many august positions. She served military dictator President Yahya Jammeh for seven years, two of them as his Minister of Justice. Jammeh, who was determinedly anti-Israel, once pronounced ‘Apartheid was in South Africa; now it has been transferred to Palestine.’ Notably Bensouda did nothing to curb a brutal dictator who suppressed free speech and was suspected to have murdered opponents. His views included a belief that Aids could be cured by his herbal mix and that ‘allowing homosexuality means allowing satanic rites’.
With a record of allegiance to a known dictator, viewed as such even by many of his contemporaneous African leaders, it is surprising that Bensouda was allowed anywhere near an international court. No wonder President Trump sanctioned Bensouda. She and her acolytes were denied visas to the United States.
Karim Khan’s suitability for the office of ICC prosecutor is similarly questionable. His charges against Israel for using ‘starvation as a method of war’ appear to take no account of the lengths to which Israel paid for and delivered food to Gaza. Not only was this logistically difficult but Netanyahu and Gallant must have been aware that Hamas was hijacking humanitarian deliveries to sell them on the black market to help fund weapons and munitions to be used against Israeli soldiers. Karim Khan has denied accusations that he groped a female colleague.
For many anti-Americans in Europe and Africa, the mitigation of their economic and political weakness has been to try to co-opt the US into a ‘world government’; they have attempted to suborn America to multinational institutions such as the ICC.
Europe, a military pygmy despite its collective wealth, lacks credible world power. It is not surprising, therefore, that despite America’s role in creating the conditions for post-war peace and prosperity, European leaders have attempted to bind the American leviathan to international legal codes and agreements. It is a plan that has been heavily promoted by Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, instigator of its 2008 Great Redesign Initiative which appeared to envisage a world ruled by lawyers, technocrats and big business.
Perversely, it was the United States which laid the foundations of an international legal system in the halcyon days following the Allied victory in World War II. It was a natural corollary of America’s desire for a United Nations (UN) to act as a global governing federation that international law should be one of its main components; the UN still describes itself as a ‘global association of governments facilitating cooperation in international law’.
Codification of international law was initially set in train by the creation of the International Law Commission (ILC) under the auspices of the UN Geneva office in 1947. In the same year the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was established to adjudicate between nations; the current president is another Muslim, Nawaf Abdallah Salim Salam, who is the prime minister designate of Lebanon. The establishment of the ICC in 1998 completed this veritable hydra of legal bureaucracies.
In deciding to prosecute both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian Wars, the ICC stands in breach of its own charter. The area of Palestine of which Gaza is part is not a country. Although the recognition of the State of Palestine, first proclaimed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1988, is supported by 146 out of 193 members of the United Nations, its application for statehood has been consistently blocked.
Whether they like it or not, Palestine, albeit treated as a State Party by the ICC, is not constituted as a sovereign state under the definitions of the UN charter. With neither Israel or Palestine being legitimate parties to the Statute of Rome, any investigation carried out under its jurisdiction should logically be considered null and void.
By this standard the ICC and its legal counterparts, largely self-appointed elite socialist bureaucracies, fail as credible arbiters of justice. It is further evident that the ICC’s credibility is fatally undermined by the preponderance of its Muslim prosecutors and their bullying of Israel. In short, the ICC is arguably both racist and institutionally corrupt. It should be abolished.
