PA Abbas Risks ICC Declaring Gaza is Not His.

PA Abbas Risks ICC Declaring Gaza is Not His. (INN).

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is looking to sue Israel for "war crimes" at the International Criminal Court (ICC), and even while it is not clear the ICC will recognize the PA as a bona fide state, there are numerous other caveats though that could hold back whatever advantage the PA thinks it might have.

Eugene Kontorovich, lecturer in international law at Northwestern University, tells Arutz Sheva that the PA must meet the binding legaldefinition of a state, and he argues the ICC is ignoring basic fundamentals of international law in order to advance the PA's application for membership.

For one, the ICC is trying to usurp the rules by incorporating UN General Assembly (GA) resolutions into its decision-making on Ramallah’s application. The GA is not authorized to recognize states by the United Nations’ charter, and yet the ICC’s chief prosecutor is taking GA decisions about “Palestine’s” observational status as grounds to treat it as a state member to the court.

As Kontorovich put it in a recent Washington Post article on the subject, the ICC prosecutor “substituted the determination of the General Assembly for her own. The GA is not a judicial body, but a political one. Its determinations are political, not legal.”

Asked to explain further in an interview with Arutz Sheva, Kontorovich expanded his argument.

“There are certain things that have legal definitions. There is a legal concept of what a state is; not what the General Assembly says a state is. If the General Assembly passed a resolution calling it a state, that wouldn't make it true. It’s a separate legal definition. If the GA passed a resolution against an innocent man stating that he is a murderer, that still does not actually make him a murderer.”

The United Nations – a general framework of institutions who administer international law for that matter – do not have a clear equivalent to a parliament that might pass laws at will, which courts would then incorporate into their jurisprudence, he says. International law is defined by conventions, both literal conventions of country’s representatives to discuss amendments and treaties on the one hand, and the “convention” or agreements produced in those meetings on the other.

Working with established laws in those international conventions and whatever case-law precedent that might exist, the ICC prosecutor is responsible from there to prove “Palestine”  fits the bill. Read the full story here.