ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu ‘not anti-semitic’ says leading human rights lawyer

We spoke to Geoffrey Robertson KC, a leading human rights lawyer who has been a United Nations war crimes judge, and began by asking how historic these arrest warrants are.

Geoffrey Robertson: We’ve had Kenyan leaders issued with warrants. They turned up, they were given bail, and they fought the case through lawyers. It never got to trial. So there are precedents. But never perhaps a leader that is so blindly backed by America, which is not a member of the court, but will bring pressure upon it. And we just hope that the judges are independent enough and they’ve shown independence by issuing this arrest warrant today.

Matt Frei: Because the Israelis will say, I’m sure, and they’ll have to answer for themselves, obviously, is that, you know, that the civilians who died in the Gaza Strip, and they would obviously dispute the numbers of civilians that have been killed, died either because they were used as human shields by Hamas or because they got in the way. It was an unfortunate so-called collateral.

Geoffrey Robertson: Collateral damage.

Matt Frei: Collateral damage in the conflict, that dreadful term, but that they did not go out of their way to target these individuals.

Geoffrey Robertson: The prosecutor will say damage is not collateral if it’s directly aimed. And so that’s the answer to that.

Matt Frei: What’s the procedure now for the ICC?

Geoffrey Robertson: The procedure is that the case goes to the next stage and Mr {Karim} Khan, or whoever it is, will seek an indictment. Mr Netanyahu can, I think, he’d be allowed to send lawyers to the court to oppose that, although it’s not necessary. The important thing to remember is that the ICC does not have the power to try him in absentia, no matter how strong the evidence.

Matt Frei: So you need to actually arrest him in order to put him on trial, to put him in the dock.

Geoffrey Robertson: They need to put him in the dock.

Matt Frei: Now, is that going to be likely?

Geoffrey Robertson: First of all, Netanyahu himself may stay away. The downside for that is there are 124 countries signed up to the ICC, so he won’t be able to travel very far.

Matt Frei: But enforcement is voluntary, isn’t it? So a country could choose not to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu with that one.

Geoffrey Robertson: They have to leave the ICC. South Africa tried this with the head of Sudan, who was indicted, and the court ruled that it couldn’t. So this is one of its obligations.

Matt Frei: So what’s the sanction? The sanction is to expel that country from the ICC?

Geoffrey Robertson: Yes, which most countries don’t want to be expelled. They will do what was done with Putin in that other conference last year. They simply warned him – he was in South Africa – South Africa warned him not to come and he didn’t. And Netanyahu would be given the same warning.

Matt Frei: So his world has shrunk considerably?

Geoffrey Robertson: It has. And he would be seen as an international fugitive.

Matt Frei: Finally, and very briefly, Geoffrey Robertson, how likely from your experience and given who else has turned up in the dock when people said it was impossible, how likely do you think it is that he, and the other people issued with this warrant, will end up in on trial?

Geoffrey Robertson: Everyone said Milosevic, indicted, he’ll never turn up. And yet his people handed him over. I think it is not impossible if he fell from power.

Matt Frei: So the most likely people to hand them over would be the Israelis themselves, rather than him getting arrested on the streets of London or Paris?

Geoffrey Robertson: It would be an easy way of disposing of him, were he to fail at the next elections, sent off to defend himself. But that’s not likely. The likelihood is there’ll be enormous American pressure to protect him. And we’ll just have to wait and hope to see this court showing its independence. It’s not anti-Semitic. That’s an outrageous lie by Israel. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about it. We can see on our television the war crimes every night as residential areas are bombed and children dug out of the rubble.