British supporters of Israel blast 'political decision' by ICC, say 'UK should treat the arrest warrants as nullities'

The British Prime Minister’s office has been vague about Thursday’s decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The warrants were requested by ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan in May.

“We respect the independence of the ICC, which is the primary institution for investigating and prosecuting the most serious crimes of international concern,” a spokesman for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday.

When asked about the implementation of the ruling if Netanyahu or Gallant were to enter the UK, he said he could not comment on “hypotheticals,” but that the UK would “always comply with its legal obligations as set out by domestic law and indeed international law.”

Former UK home secretary under the last Conservative government, Suella Braverman, aligned with U.S. President Joe Biden’s response in calling the warrants “outrageous.”

“This is a political decision dressed up as a legal one,” Braverman said in a post on 𝕏. “It can only bring the ICC into disrepute. Israel is fighting for survival against Hamas terrorists following the October 7 attacks.”

British barrister and international law expert, Natasha Hausdorff, confirmed the illegality of the move and said that governments should call out the “weaponization of international courts.”

“This is not a decision that has been based in international law, in the jurisdiction of the ICC, or even in the rules of the court,” she told Mike Graham on Talk TV. She said those rules “require it to comply with what’s called the principle of complementarity, and make sure that Israel has an opportunity to investigate any credible allegations against Israelis.”

On the contrary, said Hausdorff, “every phrase of every sentence of the public statement that the prosecutor put out summarizing his application has shown to be false, and it has also been disproven by subsequent independent reports.”

Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), said the ICC decision is irrelevant in practice.

“The UK should treat the arrest warrants as nullities because the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction,” he told ALL ISRAEL NEWS.

“Furthermore, ICC arrest warrants do not override diplomatic immunity of nationals of States, such as Israel, which are not parties to the Rome Statute which constituted the ICC, at any rate, unless the warrants were issued pursuant to an intervention by the UN Security Council, which is not the case here,” Turner said.

The former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp, described the ICC’s decision as “an obscenity that removes all credibility from the court,” adding, “The US should immediately sanction the ICC chief prosecutor and other officials.”

The new UK Labour government announced in July, soon after gaining power, that it would drop the challenge of the previous government to the ICC regarding the arrest warrants. 

The ICC's decision was delayed after Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government challenged the court’s jurisdiction in the case, citing that Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute.

UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) had also challenged the authenticity of the evidence put before the judges at the ICC. When the chief prosecutor failed to respond directly to their letter, Turner K.C. and team followed through on their threat to report Khan to the UK Bar Standards Board for his professional misconduct.

Since then, there have been separate reports of an ongoing investigation into the personal conduct of Khan with respect to his female colleagues.

In 1998, Britain signed the Rome Statute, the international treaty that created the ICC, and ratified it three years later. The UK’s ICC Act 2001 stated that the international court's request should be passed to a domestic court.

“If the request is accompanied by a warrant of arrest and the appropriate judicial officer is satisfied that the warrant appears to have been issued by the ICC, he shall endorse the warrant for execution in the United Kingdom,” the act states.

Hausdorff warned that the unprecedented behavior of the ICC could have significant ramifications for other democratic countries.

“What this decision is advertising to the world is that Western liberal democratic states like Israel, like the UK, like the US, are not permitted to exercise lawful self-defense. And when they comply with the laws of armed conflict, they will be defamed. They will be lied about,” she said.

“The misrepresentations that are propagated on international media will then be used to fuel political agendas against them at international courts, and that’s why the UK needs to be taking this extremely seriously.”

Richard Pater, Israel director of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), a Middle East think tank, told inews UK that, on the diplomatic front, the issue would pale in comparison to the current war Israel is fighting against Iranian proxy Islamist forces.

“..In the bigger scheme of things they have bigger fish to fry. I don’t expect Israel to open up a new front with the Brits on this, particularly because what is happening in parallel – there are big domestic moves on a Lebanon ceasefire.

“Israel is pushing hard for the UK to have an important role in administering the ceasefire,” he added.