America Home of Representatives has voted in favour of a invoice to sanction the Worldwide Prison Court docket (ICC) in retaliation for its arrest warrants towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the nation’s former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Legislators within the decrease chamber of the US Congress handed the “Illegitimate Court docket Counteraction Act” by an amazing margin, 243 to 140, on Thursday in a sign of robust assist for Israel.
Forty-five Democrats joined 198 Republicans in backing the invoice. No Republicans voted towards it.
The invoice now heads to the Senate, the place a Republican majority was sworn in earlier this month.
The legislation proposes sanctions for any foreigner who helps the ICC in its makes an attempt to analyze, detain or prosecute a US citizen or citizen of an allied nation that doesn’t recognise the authority of the court docket.
Neither the US nor Israel are events to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC.
The sanctions would come with the freezing of property property, in addition to the denial of visas to any foreigners who materially or financially contribute to the court docket’s efforts.
“America is passing this legislation as a result of a kangaroo court docket is searching for to arrest the prime minister of our nice ally, Israel,” Consultant Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the Home International Affairs Committee, stated in a speech earlier than Thursday’s vote.
The vote, one of many first for the reason that new Congress was seated final week, underscored robust assist amongst President-elect Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans for Israel’s authorities, regardless of its ongoing conflict in Gaza.
That battle has killed greater than 46,000 Palestinians because it started in October 2023, a lot of them ladies and kids. United Nations consultants have denounced Israel’s strategies in Gaza as “in step with the traits of genocide”.
That prompted ICC prosecutors final Might to challenge the arrest warrants towards Netanyahu and Gallant.
In response, US legislators threatened retaliation towards the ICC. In a letter despatched to outgoing US President Joe Biden in Might, dozens of human rights teams urged him to reject requires punitive motion.
“Performing on these calls would do grave hurt to the pursuits of all victims globally and to the US authorities’s potential to champion human rights and the reason for justice,” the teams wrote on the time.
This week, one other group of human rights organisations issued one other letter forward of Thursday’s vote, denouncing the Home invoice as an assault on an “impartial judicial establishment”.
Sanctioning the court docket, they wrote, will “jeopardize the flexibility of determined victims throughout all of the court docket’s investigations to entry justice, weaken the credibility of sanction instruments in different contexts, and place america at odds with its closest allies”.
The letter warned that imposing “asset freezes and entry restrictions” on ICC allies would deliver the US “the stigma of siding with impunity over justice”.
Nonetheless, the US Senate, beneath Majority Chief John Thune, has promised swift consideration of the act so Trump can signal it into legislation after he takes workplace on January 20.
In 2020, throughout his first time period in workplace, Trump sanctioned senior ICC leaders over the court docket’s investigations of US crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in occupied Palestinian territory. President Biden later lifted these sanctions.
The ICC, primarily based in The Hague, is a everlasting court docket that may prosecute people for conflict crimes, crimes towards humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.
The State of Palestine has been a member since 2015, and the court docket first introduced an investigation of crimes dedicated there by each Israeli and Hamas officers in 2019.
Although Israel will not be celebration to the ICC, the court docket has jurisdiction over crimes dedicated on a member state’s territory, whatever the nationality of these committing them.
The US has supported the court docket at occasions, as an example, when the ICC’s high prosecutor sought an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over alleged conflict crimes in Ukraine. Russia, like Israel and the US, will not be a member of the court docket.
Karim Khan, the prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant towards Netanyahu and Gallant, has stated that his choice is in keeping with the court docket’s method in all its instances, and he indicated that the warrants might stop ongoing crimes.
