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A leading British lawyer has hit out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comparison of the International Criminal Court in The Hague to the Nazi courts of the 1930s, while questioning the Prosecutor’s decision to seek a warrant for the Israeli premier’s arrest.
Mr Netanyahu made the comments after ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan issued the request in May, describing Mr Khan as “the leading anti-Semite of modern times”.
Lord Ken Macdonald KC, a former director of public prosecutions in the UK, said Mr Netanyahu’s comments about the court were “recklessly offensive”. He believed they would not have been made had its Prosecutor Karim Khan not been a Muslim.
“I want to make clear how strongly I personally deprecate Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recklessly offensive comparison between the ICC and the Nazi People’s Court of the 1930s, and I equally deprecate his reckless characterisation of Karim Khan,” Lord Macdonald told the Policy Exchange think tank on Wednesday.
“This was an offensive and, in my view, a shameful thing for the Prime Minister to say in the absence of evidence and perhaps wouldn't have been made had Mr Karim not been a Muslim.” .
Mr Khan has faced enormous pressure over his decision to seek the arrest warrants of Mr Netanyahu, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, alongside three Hamas leaders. This month, Mr Khan hit out against “threat and harassment” after a group of British lawyers advocating for Israel filed a complaint about him to the Bar Standards Board, a British regulatory body.
The UK's former Conservative government sought to derail the proceedings by filing an intervention, which the new Labour government then dropped in July. The court is reviewing Mr Khan’s applications, as well as dozens of interventions from member states and NGOs that came in support or against them.
One of the main arguments against issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders is based on a founding principle of the ICC, known as complimentarity. According to this, the court should not step in unless a state is “unwilling of unable to genuinely carry out” a prosecution – and critics say that Israel’s “robust” and “independent” courts are capable of investigating the Israeli officials in question.
Lord Macdonald agreed with this criticism, describing Israeli courts and the Supreme Court as “famously independent of the executive".
“As we've seen recently, that independence and its constitutional underpinnings have the most enormous public support in Israel. So to my part, I would be very far from concluding the Israeli state is unwilling to investigate allegations such as these,” he said.
He also questioned Mr Khan’s use of an expert panel to guide his decision making on the case. While it was common for prosecutors to seek advice from other lawyers, Mr Khan had been “handing over the power to make the decisive call to these outside experts”.
“Imagine Karim Khan's position if he hadn't followed their conclusion, trying to justify publicly that he'd sent this work to such an eminent group, but that now that he'd seen their opinion, he didn't agree with it, there would have been absolute uproar,” Lord Macdonald said.
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Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
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Thursday UAE v Ireland; Saturday UAE v Ireland; Jan 21 UAE v Scotland; Jan 23 UAE v Scotland
UAE squad Rohan Mustafa (c), Ashfaq Ahmed, Ghulam Shabber, Rameez Shahzad, Mohammed Boota, Mohammed Usman, Adnan Mufti, Shaiman Anwar, Ahmed Raza, Imran Haider, Qadeer Ahmed, Mohammed Naveed, Amir Hayat, Zahoor Khan
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
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Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
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In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
