The US House of Representatives voted in favor of a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) in retaliation for arrest warrants issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Justice. Defense Yoav Gallant.
Lawmakers in the lower house of the US Congress on Thursday passed the “No Illegitimate Courts Act” by an overwhelming majority, 243 votes to 140, a sign of strong support for Israel.
Forty-five Democrats joined 198 Republicans in supporting the bill. No Republicans voted against it.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where a Republican majority was sworn in earlier this month.
The legislation proposes sanctions for any foreigner who assists the ICC in its attempts to investigate, detain, or prosecute a U.S. citizen or a citizen of an allied country who does not recognize the Court’s authority.
Neither the United States nor Israel is a party to the Rome Statute, which created the ICC.
Sanctions would include the freezing of real estate, as well as the denial of visas to any foreigner who contributes materially or financially to the court’s efforts.
“America is passing this law because a kangaroo court seeks to arrest the prime minister of our great ally, Israel,” Rep. Brian Mast, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement. speech given before Thursday’s vote.
The vote, one of the first since the new Congress convened last week, underscored the strong support of President-elect Donald Trump’s Republican colleagues for the Israeli government, despite the ongoing war in Gaza.
This conflict has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since it began in October 2023, many of them women and children. United Nations experts have denounced Israeli methods in Gaza, calling them “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”
This prompted ICC prosecutors to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant last May.
In response, US lawmakers threatened retaliation against the ICC. In a letter sent to outgoing US President Joe Biden in May, dozens of human rights organizations urged him to reject calls for punitive measures.
“Responding to these calls would seriously harm the interests of all victims around the world and the ability of the U.S. government to uphold human rights and the cause of justice,” the groups wrote at the time.
This week, another group of human rights organizations released another letter ahead of Thursday’s vote, denouncing the House bill as an attack on an “independent judicial institution.”
Sanctioning the court, they wrote, “would jeopardize the ability of desperate victims of all the court’s investigations to access justice, weaken the credibility of sanctions tools in other contexts, and put the United States at risk.” -at odds with their closest allies.”
The letter warned that imposing “asset freezes and entry restrictions” on ICC allies would bring the United States “the stigma of siding with impunity in favor of justice.”
Nonetheless, the US Senate, led by Majority Leader John Thune, has promised to quickly consider the law so that Trump can sign it after he takes office on January 20.
In 2020, during his first term, Trump sanctioned senior ICC leaders over the court’s investigations into U.S. crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. President Biden subsequently lifted these sanctions.
The ICC, based in The Hague, is a permanent tribunal that can prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.
The state of Palestine has been a member since 2015, and the court first announced an investigation into crimes committed there by Israeli and Hamas officials in 2019.
Although Israel is not a party to the ICC, the Court has jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of a member state, regardless of the nationality of those committing them.
The United States has at times supported the court, such as when the ICC prosecutor general sought an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Russia, like Israel and the United States, is not a member of the Court.
Karim Khan, the prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant against Netanyahu and Gallant, said his decision was consistent with the court’s approach in all of its cases, and he indicated that the warrants could prevent ongoing crimes.
