The ICC’s Criminal Courts lack of jurisdiction over the so-called “situation in Palestine”

State of Israel.  Office of the Att’y General

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • The State of Israel has been committed to the cause of international criminal justice from the outset. Established in the aftermath of the catastrophic events of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jewish people, Israel was an early and passionate advocate for the establishment of an international criminal court that would hold accountable the perpetrators of heinous crimes that deeply shock the conscience of humanity. It took an active part in the negotiations leading up to the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998, and continues to consider that a diligent permanent international criminal tribunal can serve a constructive role in deterring and punishing for mass atrocities.

• • While extending its support to the values that motivated the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Israel has early on expressed deep concerns, also shared by other States, that the Court could be exposed to political manipulation that might lead it to stray from its mandate. Israel thus decided not to become a party to the Rome Statute at this stage, but has continued to play an active role in various international efforts to put an end to impunity for the gravest international crimes.
  • The Palestinian attempts to draw the ICC into core political aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have brought into a sharp focus precisely the risk that the Court might be exploited for illegitimate political gain. This is chiefly because – as the following memorandum establishes – the Court manifestly lacks jurisdiction over the so-called “situation in Palestine”. Jurisdiction is, of course, not a mere formality: it plays a critical role in defining judicial competence in order to prevent abuse of the judicial process, guarantee that courts do not stray from the mandates carefully entrusted to them, and insulate the law from both power and populism. Any court departing from such essential rules guiding its activity would be unfaithful to the requirements of its judicial character, and would gravely undermine its judicial integrity.
  • In the case of the “situation in Palestine”, the fundamental precondition to jurisdiction enshrined in the Rome Statute – namely, that a State having criminal jurisdiction over its territory and nationals has delegated such jurisdiction to the Court – is clearly not met. As demonstrated in the memorandum, a substantive legal inquiry into this matter cannot be sidestepped; and any such inquiry must lead to the conclusion that the precondition is indeed not satisfied.
  • A substantive legal inquiry into the precondition of the Court’s jurisdiction cannot be averted primarily because the events surrounding the purported accession of “Palestine” to the Rome Statute in 2015 did not settle the highly controversial question of Palestinian statehood.

In fact, the administrative act of circulating the Palestinian purported instrument of accession was accompanied by an explicit clarification that it was carried out without prejudice to the legal question of whether a Palestinian State existed. UN General Assembly resolution 67/19, on which the circulation of the Palestinian instrument of accession relied, had concerned a procedural matter of Palestinian representation within the UN alone, and had anyhow referred to Palestinian statehood as a future aspiration.

By the same token, the subsequent participation of “Palestine” in the ICC Assembly of States Parties was facilitated on the understanding that the legal question as to whether a Palestinian State existed would be left for others.

Against this background, the ICC Prosecutor’s decision of January 2015 to open a preliminary examination into what she termed the “situation in Palestine” was said to be without prejudice to the question of the Court’s jurisdiction, which still remains pending.

• • 6. If a sound assessment of the legal and factual record is undertaken, its inevitable conclusion must be that a sovereign Palestinian State does not exist, and that the precondition to the Court’s jurisdiction thus cannot be fulfilled. This is because sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip remains in abeyance *, and the Palestinian entity manifestly fails to meet the criteria for statehood under general international law. In particular, the Palestinian Authority lacks effective control over the territory concerned (and in claiming that the territory is occupied by Israel, essentially concedes that that is so).

The alleged recognition of “Palestine” by some States cannot compensate for the absence of the established criteria for statehood; and the right of the Palestinians to self-determination must not be conflated with any claim to statehood.

The Palestinian claim to existing statehood is indeed fraught with significant contradictions, as senior Palestinian officials themselves acknowledge by continuing to refer to a Palestinian State in future terms.

• 7. The absence of a sovereign Palestinian State further means that there is clearly no sovereign ability to prosecute that could be delegated to the Court, and that there is no “territory of” a State (within the meaning of the Rome Statute) over which the Court may exercise its jurisdiction. Any delimitation by the Court of the territory concerned would anyhow require it to act in contravention of binding Israeli-Palestinian agreements that expressly leave such matters to direct negotiation between the parties, and to make determinations that are wholly unsuitable for an international criminal tribunal. No reliance can be made in this context on such strictly political terms as “the occupied Palestinian territories”, reference to which is consistently made without prejudice to the fundamentally legal question of sovereign title.
  8. Finally, even if the Rome Statute were to be misinterpreted so as to allow non-sovereign entities to confer jurisdiction upon the Court, existing Israeli-Palestinian agreements make it clear that the Palestinians have no criminal jurisdiction either in law or in fact over Area C, Jerusalem and Israeli nationals – and thus cannot validly delegate such jurisdiction to the Court. Here, too, any conclusion that the precondition to the Court’s jurisdiction is fulfilled would not withstand any serious legal and factual scrutiny, and would inevitably run up against the terms of the Rome Statute itself as well as the rules of general international law more broadly.
  9. Israel acknowledges that the lack of jurisdiction on the part of international tribunals in respect of any particular disputes does not relieve States of their duty to fulfil their international legal obligations.

In the present context, Israel remains willing and able to address any Palestinian grievance through various remedial avenues (including multi-layered review mechanisms already in place), and by direct bilateral negotiations.

Cynical attempts to manipulate the ICC into acting where its jurisdiction is manifestly lacking threaten to undermine not only the Court’s legitimacy and credibility, but also the prospects for achieving the just and lasting settlement long awaited by Israelis and Palestinians alike

* The legality of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria according to international law  claims otherwise.

Eugene Kontorovich also claims otherwise;

Under international law, occupation occurs when a country takes over the sovereign territory of another country. But the West Bank was never part of Jordan, which seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its entire Jewish population. Nor was it ever the site of an Arab Palestinian state.

Moreover, a country cannot occupy territory to which it has sovereign title, and Israel has the strongest claim to the land. International law holds that a new country inherits the borders of the prior geopolitical unit in that territory. Israel was preceded by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, whose borders included the West Bank. Hansell’s memo fails to discuss this principle for determining borders, which has been applied everywhere from Syria and Lebanon to post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine.

Even on its own terms, [Hansell’s 1978] memo’s conclusions no longer apply. Because occupation is part of the law of war, Hansell wrote, the state of occupation would end if Israel entered into a peace treaty with Jordan. In 1994 Jerusalem and Amman signed a full and unconditional peace treaty, but the State Department neglected to update the memo.

Even if there were an occupation, the notion that it creates an impermeable demographic bubble around the territory—no Jew can move in—has no basis in the history or application of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Almost every prolonged occupation since 1949—from the Allies’ 40-year administration of West Berlin to Turkey’s 2016 occupation of northern Syria—has seen population movement into the occupied territory. In none of these cases has the U.S., or the United Nations, ever claimed a violation of this Geneva Convention provision.