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Di Giovanni and Hale say Rubio's ICC campaign guards impunity for atrocities
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Two war-crimes investigators argued in Foreign Policy on Monday that Washington's campaign to take apart the International Criminal Court serves no American interest it can name, and defends one it cannot say out loud.
Janine di Giovanni and Christopher Hale, who run the documentation group the Reckoning Project, were writing against the policy Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last month: a diplomatic drive to disable the court, in his words, brick by brick, with sanctions on its personnel, visa revocations and pressure on other states to stop cooperating.
The sovereignty case for it does not hold, in their telling. Under the court's founding principle of complementarity it acts only where a state will not or cannot investigate its own; no American is currently under ICC investigation or prosecution.
That leaves one prerogative genuinely at risk, the authors wrote — the freedom to commit atrocity crimes without consequence.
They also placed Israel inside the campaign rather than beside it, writing that it is working with the United States on the effort while its prime minister is the subject of an active ICC arrest warrant.
The court issued warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024, in the Palestine situation. It is that file, more than any American one, that the campaign now surrounds.
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