The Politicization, Coercion and Disabling of the International Criminal Court
UNITED NATIONS, 26 May 2025
Alfred de Zayas and Peter Koenig | Global Research – TRANSCEND Media Service
23 May 2025 – This is the body of a response by Alfred De Zayas to an inquiry he has received on how to contact the ICC. Alfred clearly outlines the difficulties one faces in attempting to contact it, pointing to the political nature of the Court.
Professor De Zayas goes, however further, by focusing at the international crimes committed, to which the ICC does not or only haphazardly react – because the powers-that-be prevent it from taking actions. Prosecutors and judges are scared to do what they are supposed to do.
Many quit their jobs for fear of reprisals.
Please see for yourself the extraordinary account by Professor De Zayas, former Acting UN Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.
— Peter Koenig, 23 May 2025
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The Politicization, Coercion and Disabling of the International Criminal Court
By Prof. Alfred de Zayas
If you are lucky enough to establish contact with the ICC, or the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as laymen and laywomen we can only send information to the Prosecutor [of the ICC under article 15 of the ICC Statute].
The Prosecutor has full authority to act thereon, but he also has full discretion and may ignore it.
The latter was his reaction to our [Geneva International Peace Research Institute] recent legal brief of 22 May 2024; 29 pages, signed by quite a few professors of law, on the complicity of the European Commission in genocide.
The ICC prosecutor did not act either on previous legal briefs submitted by top professors, e.g. against Tony Blair for violations of articles 6, 7 and 8 of the ICC statute in connection with the 2003 Iraq war; nor has he investigated the legal briefs submitted on behalf of the victims of war crimes committed by the US in Afghanistan.
Today it is all the more urgent to speak out, because what we are witnessing in Gaza is not only Apartheid, not only war crimes, but full-scale ethnic cleansing, already at the level of genocide within the meaning of the text of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The ultimate crime is being perpetrated openly, in front of our eyes, despite three orders by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). And the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, etc. are all complicit in the crime (Article III e of the Genocide Convention) by providing military, economic, political, diplomatic and propagandistic support to the genocidal state.
The media also bears responsibility for whitewashing the crimes, downplaying the murder of civilians, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, churches, and temples, attacking medics, engaging in “apology of genocide.”
The jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda gives us examples of “incitement” to genocide that are also relevant in the Gaza context. Some political statements by our own representatives and by journalists surely go over the threshold and constitute a violation or article III c of the Genocide Convention.
NEVER AGAIN — we must all protest and send copies of our protests to our representatives in Parliament, to politicians and journalists. We must go out in the streets and demonstrate — as I did 50 years ago against the Vietnam war; “Not in our name” — “If the government does not stop the Vietnam war, we will stop the government.”
Every day, every hour more innocent people are being massacred, even as I write these words.
In solidarity with humanity and all victims of war.
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Alfred de Zayas is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order 2012-18. He is the author of twelve books including Building a Just World Order (2021); Countering Mainstream Narratives (2022); and The Human Rights Industry (Clarity Press, 2021).
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist who worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America and writes regularly for online journals. Koenig is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed, fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe; co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book, When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis (Clarity Press – 1 Nov 2020); and a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization and a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Go to Original – globalresearch.ca
Tags: Conflict, Geopolitics, International Criminal Court ICC, Politics, United Nations
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