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An international tribunal to prosecute individuals for war crimes. In agreeing to the legislation, UK officials insisted the ICC must not “criminalise the use of nuclear weapons”.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Mark Curtis subtitled a 2025 story The [UK] government has long believed the ICC would only act in “failed states” and is not able to indict UK nationals, declassified files show.[1]
Official Narrative
The ICC seeks to investigate and prosecute those responsible for grave offenses such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.[2]
Criticism
For years the ICC served exclusively as an instrument of the West against unpopular politicians from the Global South. As it initially only indicted African politicians, it was derided on the continent as the "Africa Court".[3]Tony Cartalucci wrote in 2019 that the ICC is:[4][5][6][7]
"neither international nor a legitimate court, but is most certainly criminal"
"It is an institutionalised tool – one of many – used by Western corporate-financier interests to coerce and control nations across the developing world."
Wikipedia Criticism
Not normal for Wikipedia, the court already has a own page full of faults with the court. Some governments have refused to recognize the court's assertion of jurisdiction, with other civil groups also accusing the court of bias, focusing too much on Europe and racism. Others have also questioned the effectiveness of the court outright. A big vocal opponent of the court is the US.[8]
Membership
Map of the world with parties to the International Criminal Court
International Criminal Court members
Signed but not ratified and have accepted the court's jurisdiction
On 15 November 2023, South Africa filed a referral to the International Criminal Court for an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. During a state visit to Qatar, President Cyril Ramaphosa said his country believes Israel is committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians have been killed and hospitals and public infrastructure have been destroyed:
“As South Africa we have accordingly, together with many other countries across the world, referred this whole Israeli government action to the International Criminal Court.
“We have put through a referral because we believe that war crimes are being committed there. And of course we do not condone the actions that were taken by Hamas earlier, but similarly we condemn the actions that are currently underway and believe that they warrant an investigation by the ICC.”
Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress party said it would support the motion tabled by the leftist opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters for the country to shut down the Israeli Embassy and cut diplomatic ties with the country.[11]
Surveillance and intimidation
The Mossad ran a years long surveillance and intimidation campaign against the ICC and it's prosecutors to end the effort of their war crimes investigation against Israel.[12][13][14][15]
Arrest warrants issued
On 21 November 2024, the pre-trial Chamber I of the ICC issued warrants of arrest for two individuals: Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant
The ICC found reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant each bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts; and for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.[16]
ICC rejects Israel's request
On 16 July 2025, the ICC rejected Israel’s request to halt the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant and to suspend the investigation into war crimes in Palestine.
In conclusion, the Chamber finds that the suspension of investigation pursuant to article 19(7) of the Statute can only result from a State challenging the admissibility of a case.
Since Israel has not challenged admissibility, the Chamber rejects Israel’s request to declare that the Prosecution must suspend its investigation into the cases against Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant, let alone the Situation as a whole.
For these reasons, the Chamber hereby rejects the request.[17]
The ICC reaffirmed: "No one is above the law—not even sitting heads of state."[18]
Putin arrest warrant
On 17 March 2023, the Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, introduced an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova. The warrant, which accused Putin and Lolva-Belova of conducting the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a “network of camps” across the Russian Federation, inspired a wave of incendiary commentary in the West.
“The ICC has an arrest warrant for Putin because he has organised the kidnapping of at least 16,000 Ukrainian children from their families and sent them to Russia. It is exactly what Hitler did in World War II.”
The ICC prosecutor Karim Khan appeared to have based his arrest warrant on research produced by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL). Yale HRL’s work was funded and guided by the US State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilisation Operations, an entity the Biden administration established in May 2022 to advance the prosecution of Russian officials.
During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Yale HRL’s executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, claimed his report provided proof that “thousands of children are in a hostage situation.” Invoking the Holocaust, Raymond asserted, “We are dealing with the largest network of children camps seen in the 21st century.”
Yet in an interview with Jeremy Loffredo, the co-author of this report, and in his own paper for Yale HRL, Raymond contradicted many of the bombastic claims he made to the media about child hostages. During a phone conversation with Loffredo, Raymond acknowledged that “a large amount” of the camps his team investigated were “primarily cultural education – like, I would say, teddy bear.”
Yale HRL’s report similarly acknowledges that most of the camps it profiled provided free recreational programs for disadvantaged youth whose parents sought “to protect their children from ongoing fighting” and “ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live.” Nearly all of the campers returned home in a timely manner after attending with the consent of their parents, according to the paper. The State Department-funded report further concedes that it found “no documentation of child mistreatment.”
Yale HRL based its research entirely on Maxar satellite data, Telegram postings, and Russian media reports, relying on Google translate to interpret them and at times misrepresented the articles in its citations. The State Department-funded unit conceded that it performed no field research for its paper, stating that it “does not conduct ground-level investigations and therefore did not request access to the camps.”
Unlike the Yale investigators who inspired the ICC’s arrest warrant, Loffredo gained unfettered access to a Russian government camp in Moscow that houses youth from the war-torn Donbas region. Though it is precisely the kind of centre that Yale HRL – and by extension, the ICC – have portrayed as a “re-education camp” for Ukrainian child hostages, he found a hotel full of happy campers receiving free classical music lessons in their native Russian language from first-class instructors – a “teddy bear,” as Raymond called it.
At The Donbas Express music camp located just outside Moscow, youth told Loffredo they were grateful to have found refuge from the Ukrainian army’s years-long campaign of shelling and besiegement of their homeland. By fleeing the war in Donbas, these children had escaped a nightmarish military conflict for which Yale HRL and the ICC have demonstrated little or no concern.[19]
NATO Impunity
The court echoes a wider culture of impunity for NATO members, so, for example, Radovan Karadžić was jailed for 40 years as a war criminal, but George W. Bush and Tony Blair have not even been charged for committing a war of aggression which is widely understood to have been illegal and which even a UK Deputy Prime Minister termed as such.[20]
