The United States House of Representatives has voted in favor of banning the International Criminal Court (ICC) in retaliation for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country's former defense minister. Yoav Gallant.
Judges in the lower house of the US Congress passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” by a large margin, 243 to 140, on Thursday in a show 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 laws It imposes sanctions on any alien who assists the ICC in attempting to investigate, arrest or prosecute a US citizen or a citizen of an allied country that does not accept the jurisdiction of the court.
Neither the US nor Israel is a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC.
Sanctions will include the confiscation of assets, and the denial of visas to any foreigner who provides money or money to support the court.
“The United States is issuing this order because the kangaroo court wants to imprison the prime minister of Israel,” Representative Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a speech Thursday before the vote.
The vote, one of the first since Congress was in session last week, confirmed strong support among Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump for the Israeli government, despite the ongoing war in Gaza.
The war has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since it began in October 2023, most of them women and children. United Nations experts have criticized Israel's tactics in Gaza as “akin to genocide”.
This prompted ICC prosecutors last May to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
In response, US lawmakers threatened to retaliate against the ICC. In a letter sent to US President Joe Biden in May, many human rights organizations urged him to reject requests for sanctions.
“To do so would seriously harm the interests of all victims of torture around the world and the US government's ability to promote human rights and justice,” the groups said. he wrote at that time.
This week, a group of human rights organizations released another a letter ahead of Thursday's vote, criticizing the House's bill as an attack on “independent agency”.
Blocking the court, they wrote, “undermines the ability of those involved in all court investigations to obtain justice, weakens the integrity of the instruments of sanctions in other jurisdictions, and places the United States in a position inconsistent with its closest allies”.
The letter warned that imposing “an asset freeze and entry ban” on ICC allies would bring the US “unjustified shame”.
However, the US Senate, led by Majority Leader John Thune, has promised to quickly consider the issue so that Trump can sign it into law when he takes office on January 20.
In 2020, during his first term in office, Mr. Trump to be allowed The ICC's chief prosecutors are investigating US crimes in Afghanistan and Israel's crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. President Biden later lifted the sanctions.
The ICC, based in The Hague, is a permanent court that can prosecute people for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and crimes of violence.
The Palestinian Authority has been a member since 2015, and the court first announced crimes committed by Israeli officials and Hamas there in 2019.
Although Israel is not a member of the ICC, the court has jurisdiction over crimes committed in the territory of a member state, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators.
The US supported the court in some cases, for example, when the ICC's chief prosecutor requested it to be arrested to Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crimes in Ukraine. Russia, like Israel and the US, is not a member of the court.
Karim Khan, the prosecutor who issued the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, said the decision was consistent with the court's process in all of its cases, and noted that the warrants could prevent ongoing trials.