Very often international agencies they are established with seemingly noble purposes, but end up devolving into blatant politicization that makes a mockery of their original intent. A stark example is the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established in 2002 to bring to justice powerful perpetrators who have committed the world’s worst crimes with impunity. Instead, the court has become a case study in institutional excess, politically selective enforcement, and abuse.
In one Wall Street Journal Secretary of State Marco Rubio has rightly called for the removal of the ICC, “brick by brick if necessary.” He’s right. Although the US has never joined the ICC, the agency claims that through international laws never enacted by the US, it has jurisdiction over US individuals and government officials, including members of our armed services and domestic police forces. That means he could take the Americans to trial and jail them. This threat is not theoretical. The ICC prosecutor threatened 12 US senators who criticized it.
The ICC’s prosecution of Israeli leaders is the clearest, most ugly example of the abandonment of impartial justice for blatant political violations of human rights. In late 2024, the court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for conducting the war in Gaza. The ICC warrants completely ignored the context of the war: Israel was responding to the barbaric attacks of October 7, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Israel had a sovereign, moral right to defend itself and dismantle the army of Hamas, a terrorist organization that deliberately carried out its attacks on the citizens of Gaza in such a way as to maximize the loss of innocent civilians. Treating Israel’s military response and Hamas’s actions as morally equivalent—as the warrants in fact did—was a deep injustice against a democracy fighting a defensive war under difficult civilian conditions. No country in military history has waged an urban war with greater effort to minimize civilian casualties than Israel in Gaza.
The episode confirmed that the ICC was willing to bend its legal standards under political pressure from member states hostile to Israel rather than apply the law neutrally.
What makes this situation particularly boring and ugly is that the ICC Prosecutor General, who is originally from Britain, has been accused of sexual harassment. It is suspected that his behavior on the court was motivated to divert attention from his personal scandal and gain political support from anti-Israel and anti-American nations. He has recently been disbarred from practicing as a solicitor in the UK
The case against Israel is not an isolated incident. The ICC’s overwhelming historical focus on African nations has similarly drawn accusations of double standards, even as far more powerful states with worse records escape scrutiny by simply refusing to participate.
Given the biases of the ICC, Secretary of State Rubio is right to watch it. The agency, in Rubio’s words, is indeed “waging war against our country” through “so-called international law. The ICC is supported and run by a powerful network of left-wing non-governmental organizations, complacent globalists and hostile Third World governments.”
Case closed!
