David Bosco is associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies. He is author of Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World and Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics.
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The Jerusalem Post published yesterday a lengthy profile of Israel’s Military Advocate-General, Sharon Afek. The article notes that Afek will have a key role in shaping Israel’s posture toward the International Criminal Court (ICC), which in 2015 opened a preliminary examination of the situation in Palestine.
I wrote earlier this week in the Washington Post about an attempt to prosecute senior Syrian security officials in Spain’s courts. Human rights lawyers are representing a Spanish woman whose brother was allegedly tortured and killed by regime officials.
For the first time, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is poised to open an investigation that explicitly includes alleged crimes by U.S. personnel, setting up a possible confrontation between the United States and the court. Specifically, the ICC prosecutor is preparing to launch a full investigation in Afghanistan that will scrutinize U.S.
A few weeks before the U.S. presidential election, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) released her latest update on the court's long-running inquiry into alleged crimes committed in Afghanistan. While emphasizing that Taliban and insurgent crimes will be the focus, that update doubled down on the prosecutor's previous insistence that U.S. personnel may have committed war crimes in Afghanistan. And the prosecutor even took her scrutiny of U.S.
I wrote yesterday in Foreign Policy about the coming ICC investigation in Afghanistan. Unless something changes dramatically in the next days and weeks, that investigation will include some allegations against U.S. personnel (alongside a much broader array of possible crimes by insurgent forces and Afghan government officials). Specifically, the prosecutor has focused on U.S. detention practices between 2003 and 2005.
News broke last night that the South African government had decided to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC). The announcement sent shock waves through the international law and human rights worlds. Burundi's government had already announced its own intention to depart the ICC, but the South African move is much more significant.
A team from the ICC prosecutor's office (OTP) has begun a trip to Israel and the West Bank. Israel recently decided to allow the visit, something that had been in doubt previously (I've written here about the likely motives behind Israel's offer of limited cooperation).