The arrest warrant issued on Thursday, November 21, 2024, by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has significant legal and political significance and represents a turning point in international justice: it is the first time in the history of the Court that an arrest warrant has been issued against personalities of a state supported by Western democracies.
The decision to issue the two arrest warrants (accompanying the one amazon database against the commander in chief of the military wing of Hamas, Diab Ibrahim al-Masri), requested on 20 May 2024 by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to a Pre-Trial Chamber of the Court, is part of a process of strengthening international criminal justice and consolidating the role of the ICC, which in 2023 had already issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, and against Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children's Rights at the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, for war crimes committed in Ukraine.
This was also a turning point, since no arrest warrant had ever been issued against the leader of a country that is a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Both cases mark a paradigm shift in international criminal law and seem to be moving, together with recent decisions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in the direction of opening a legal horizon in which supranational law takes on a leading role in the management of international conflicts in a geopolitical context fraught with tensions.
In fact, in the past, since its establishment in 2002, the ICC had limited itself to prosecuting leaders and military chiefs almost exclusively from African states, indicting over fifty individuals, including twenty-one detainees in The Hague, ten convicted of crimes and four acquitted. This approach had raised criticism and suspicions of political bias and of favoring Western strategies of "regime change" on that continent, so much so that it was accused by some African countries of being an instrument of legal neocolonialism. The African Union itself has often contested the legitimacy of the ICC, as in the case of the arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, denounced as an attack on the continent's political autonomy.