Foreign Minister Marise Payne had good reason to express Australia’s deep concern over the International Criminal Court’s ruling that it has jurisdiction over “the situation in Palestine”. As University of Wollongong law professor Greg Rose pointed out on our Commentary page on Monday, the decision presages decades of prosecutions targeted at Israeli leaders for alleged war crimes, a goal that has long been a key ambition of Palestinian leaders in their campaign against the Jewish state.
Yet it is a judgment that is based in legal fantasy land given that, as Senator Payne noted, there is no such sovereign state as “Palestine” that has rights under the 2002 Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty that forms the basis on which the court may or may not take action such as that demanded by the Palestinians. Neither is Israel among the 123 countries that have signed the statute, which mandates specifically that the ICC’s jurisdiction and right to act is reserved for, and confined to, only those countries that consent to it.
In 2015, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas lodged a declaration under the Rome Statute accepting the ICC’s jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed “in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, since June 13, 2014”. He did so in a fit of pique after the rejection of a UN Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, with the US and Australia voting against.
Read the editorial in The Australian.