Palestinian territories: "long and complicated investigation" begins for the ICC
The ICC investigation is expected to rule in particular on crimes committed during the Gaza war in 2014 (Illustrative image).
REUTERS / Mohammed Salem
Text by: Marie Normand Follow
4 min
Despite Israel's objections, the International Criminal Court (ICC) declared itself competent on Friday, February 5 to try possible war crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territories.
There is therefore no longer any obstacle to opening an investigation.
What to expect
Interview with François Dubuisson, professor of law at the Free University of Brussels.
Publicity
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RFI
: After five years of preliminary investigation, the ICC attorney general concluded at the end of 2019 that crimes had been committed in the occupied territories and in the Gaza Strip.
What crimes are we talking about?
François Dubuisson:
The prosecutor's report specifically targeted the 2014 Gaza war. War crimes could be blamed on both parties: on the leaders of Hamas or on other Palestinian groups such as the Islamic Jihad, in particular for having launched missiles on Israeli cities, and the Israeli side to the army for targeting civilians or civilian buildings.
More generally, the activities of colonization of the Palestinian territory are targeted, since the installation of civilian populations by an occupying power constitutes a war crime.
This could therefore cover all the installation of settlers by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Since the publication of this report, the prosecutor's office has also identified the events
of the Gaza marches in 2018
as possible war crimes: the Israeli army opened fire on demonstrators who were mainly civilians.
When can we expect convictions
?
ICC practice shows that investigations can take several years, it will probably take two or three years to obtain indictments.
The investigation has just started: it has already been identified that war crimes may have been committed, but that does not prevent the prosecutor's office from adding other crimes to the list.
One can think in particular of
the crime of apartheid
which has just been recognized by the NGO B'Tselem, the main Israeli organization in the field of human rights.
The whole difficulty arises from the fact that the ICC has criminal jurisdiction.
It must therefore identify individuals and establish specific charges against individuals.
But Israel has no obligation to cooperate.
It will therefore be difficult to determine who, during the war in Gaza, is responsible for a particular missile fire that resulted in the death of Palestinian civilians.
For some crimes, on the contrary, it will be easy to go up the chain of decisions;
when it comes to colonization, for example, these are official and well-documented policies.
On the Palestinian side, there is an obligation of cooperation, it was the corollary of their membership in the ICC.
Trials could therefore be faster.
What could be the consequences of possible convictions of Israeli nationals
?
It will be very difficult to obtain their effective conviction.
These individuals should remain on Israeli territory or travel only to states which are not party to the Rome statutes and which have no obligation to cooperate.
This was the case, for example, of the Sudanese head of state, Omar al-Bashir, who while he was the subject of an arrest warrant from the ICC, continued his activities as president and traveled to within different states without being worried.
We are probably more in a political and symbolic process.
If a number of senior Israeli leaders were subject to arrest warrants and charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity, it would seriously damage Israel's image.
This could lead to a number of reversals on the international level, in particular on the part of European states which could have more difficulty in sealing privileged economic agreements with Israel.
►Also read: The ICC judges that its "territorial jurisdiction" extends to the Palestinian Territories
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