In an unprecedented move, the International Criminal Court (ICC) ordered its prosecutor to reopen an already closed investigation into crimes allegedly committed by the Israeli navy when boarding the Mavi Marmara, a ship participating in the 2010 blockade-busting flotilla to Gaza. The ICC’s decision, writes Avi Bell, disregards both international law and the facts of the case:
[The ICC’s ruling] holds that the prosecutor should have taken into account facts and actions that are outside the jurisdiction of the court in deciding whether to bring charges. It [also] holds that the prosecutor should assume the truth of even the wildest accusations in deciding whether to bring charges; in other words, there should be a non-rebuttable presumption of guilt in the preliminary-investigation stage.
And most shockingly, the ICC holds that crimes have sufficient gravity to interest the court even if they have very few actual victims, as long as they are widely covered by the media and are subject to a lot of political activity at the UN.
Needless to say, none of these holdings is accompanied by any citation to precedent. That’s because they are without any precedent. And it’s a safe bet that these “rules” will never be applied to any . . . non-Israeli defendant.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-icc-declares-war-on-israel/