> ..... he calls on the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96) for the International Criminal Court, which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. EU companies would then no longer be allowed to comply with US sanctions if they violate EU interests. Companies that violate this would then be liable for damages.
EU is in a very tough spot right now. They're getting squeezed on all sides economically by USA and China while simultaneously facing a Russian invasion on their eastern borders. The relationship with the American administration has deteriorated badly and any action seen as "retaliation", such as this policy blockade, would almost definitely result in USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war. I think, unfortunately, that will lead to a quick victory for Russia unless EU nations want to put boots on the ground.
It’s kind of hard to see how much more support the US could withdraw from Ukraine, judging by the last article I read that gave Ukraine until Thursday to accept the latest peace deal negotiated between USA and Russia.
If we are in the world you describe, EU might as well do as it wants - its downside has been capped.
By the way, most material support by the US is actually purchased by other NATO members. The US recycles the facade of support, there is very little actionable support.
From the Russia POV invading Ukraine was a response to NATO expanding there. An imminent invasion of Europe seems outside of Russia’s geopolitical goals.
But Europe’s leaders on the other hand do seem invested in escalating this conflict, a lack of finances notwithstanding.
That's the biggest question of the century. Imagine that EU and China make a deal, and they backstab US and Russia respectively. EU and China are physically so far away from each other that there's no way they'd actually run into direct conflict, meanwhile by backstabbing, both of them could easily get what they want. What I'm trying to say is that if you flipped the alliances and aligned EU with China and US with Russia, Russia would collapse within one battle maximum while EU's support would be just enough to push the 50/50 chance of Taiwan invasion towards decisive Chinese victory. Everyone happy - China becomes the world's #1 superpower, while EU remains undisputable #2 and US gets sent back to lick its wounds. Sure, EU might suffer from severing its ties with the US, but if the alternative scenario is US abandoning EU and the latter facing Russia alone, then this stops being such a crazy idea.
>USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war
I thought the only way USA was supporting Ukraine was by no longer refusing to sell them extraordinarily expensive weapons. So, no longer [openly] hampering them.
> unless EU nations want to put boots on the ground.
Is such a thing even possible in the EU? I understand that it's an economic and policy bloc. Does Brussels have the authority to raise an army from EU members?
It's a bad situation allright, but sucking up to Trump even more isn't going to make things better. Europe needs to grow a pair, help Ukraine way more, and be prepared to fight Russia sooner rather than later.
In France recently the army chief-of-staff declared that we must be prepared to "lose its children" in a war, if it wants to avoid it. Of course we should. The resulting outcry may be a sign we've already lost.
I see it as a great opportunity, that we in the EU get our shit together, to not be dependant on the US anymore. Nor russia. Nor china.
So far we still can afford the luxory of moving the european parliament around once a month, because we cannot agree on one place. Lots of nationalistic idiotic things going on and yes, if those forces win, the EU will fall apart.
If russia graps most of Ukraine, this would be really bad(see the annexion of chzech republic 1938, that gave Hitler lots of weapons he did not had), but it is totally preventable without boots on the ground (russia struggles hard as well).
Just not if too many people fall for the russian fueled nationalistic propaganda.
The EU is not facing a Russian invasion on their Eastern border. It (or perhaps we should say NATO) is participating in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
Im going to go ahead and predict that the EU will not risk it.If it were China ? maybe they would pull the lever to activate this counter.
Previously when the US reneged on the JCPOA viz Iran , they had a similar law/faclity that theoreticall could have been used but never was.
As an addition the EU Commission is currently imposing pretty similar sanction on a Journalist [1] so yeah i dont see much movement on that law being used.Most likely they will try to wait it out.
Thanks for promoting russian propaganda (I mean the framing and source). Unfortunately tolerance has to stop with the intolerant. For anyone actually interested in the substance of why she is banned it seems rather clear and reasonable from the official EU Council decision. These decisions always end in front of the courts, so they only can list things for which they have direct evidence; presumably there is this much more - e.g. a good chance that in the background she is being funded by Russia for this work:
> Alina Lipp runs the blog “Neues aus Russland”, in which she systematically disseminates misinformation about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and delegitimises the Ukrainian government, especially with a view to manipulating German public sentiment as regards support for Ukraine.
> Furthermore, she is using her role as a war correspondent with the Russian armed forces in eastern Ukraine to spread Russian war propaganda. She regularly appears in troop entertainment and propaganda shows on the Russian military TV channel Zvezda.
> Thus, Alina Lipp is engaging in and supporting actions by the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten security and stability in the Union and in a third country (Ukraine) through the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference, and through facilitating an armed conflict in a third country.
The more USA is going to use this leaver, the likely they will make this leaver useless in the future. Like with China, when they overused chips leaver which stunted China for a while, but eventually gave them a way to establish their own chip industry. Now that leaver is becoming effectively useless. It will ends up same with EU.
The best China has is an internationally uncompetitive "7nm" fab and that's the best they'll have until they can manufacture EUV machines domestically.
So the EUV blockade has absolutely been effective and the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
I noticed that people love pointing how far AI field has advanced in a few years and extrapolate next few years. While at the same time being dismissive of Chinese semiconductor manufacturing process. In similar vein I also remember claims that TSMC Fab in Arizona can never work, and yet it does. So I don't know man, I wouldn't underestimate what a billion of enterprising people can do. Especially when paired with the system that has a pipeline of funneling smart people into elite schools.
Okay? There's a lot of chips you can make that aren't the cutting edge. You don't need a 4090 to do AI, as evidenced by all the AI we did before the 4090. You definitely don't need a (random Intel chip) 14900HX to do general-purpose computing, as evidenced by all the general-purpose computing we did before the 14900HX.
You are ignoring the possibility of technological disruption.
Apple disrupted Nokia and Blackberry. ARM is currently disrupting Intel.
What if someone lands on a break-through using a completely different tech: what if X-ray lithography [1] becomes viable enough that they don’t have to acquire state-of-art EUV machines from ASML?
[1] X-ray lithography was abandoned in the 80s but it is being revisited by Substrate https://substrate.com/our-purpose. They are an American company that hopes to make it commercially viable by being cheaper and far less complex than EUV.
Apart from gaming and llms, most of the chip applications including all of military and consumer electronics is more than happy with 7nm process, whatever that means (proper nanometers those ain't).
I know some people live in the IT bubble and measure whole reality by it, but that's not so much true for the world out there. They have ie roughly F-35 equivalent, minus some secret sauces (which may not be so secret at the end since it seems they stole all of it).
You are making a mistake of thinking of them as yet another russia, utterly corrupt, dysfunctional at every level and living off some 'glorious past', when reality is exactly the opposite.
It's directly analogous to China issuing export bans. They tried this with critical minerals. Critical minerals aren't actually all that uncommon. They just weren't being actively extracted in most places. Now many extraction projects are starting to roll around the globe because it has become clear China was willing to use access to them as leverage.
My guess is that China will be highly reluctant to restrict exports of manufactured goods going forward. Doing so would directly threaten their own power base, just as the Trump administration's actions are currently taking a sledge hammer to the U.S.'s power base.
Ultimately, this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
It is not equivalent. Rare earths are, as you say, not actually that rare, but they are still a finite resource, and the CCP quite publicly discussed that it isn't a good idea to sell their domestic stockpile internationally while a significant amount of their economy runs on it. They raised prices to factor in that future availability might be more important than short-term profit.
The chip ban on the other hand is about R&D and labor, both things that do not diminish over time. Instead, the ban seeks to slow down Chinese advancement in areas relying on those chips, AI in particular. Both measures will lead to short-term issues, long-term lost growth, and mid-term new industries in the respective countries/markets.
Is that true? I think the "we've actually used this leaver, just once" is much more likely to cause European judges to be extremely trepedatious. There's a difference between sanctioning an entire country and it's most important industries, which will force it to react and fight, and just victimizing a single judge, who Europeans can ignore the plight of.
The best example with China is actually their rare earth wolf warrior bullshit. It’s taken a lever that could have been decisive in a war and neutered it.
The reluctance of the EU leadership to so anything materially significant about anything they claim to care about is kind of telling.
It's either that the leadership is so caught up in their own ivory tower bubble of pure rhetoric to realize they havent really put in the logistics to actually affect reality or that they somehow don't really want the consequences of actually changing things.
For this is pretty clear what they need to do to create any real digital sovereignty and yet the seem to not really be willing to take the obvious step of just banning the use of any technology that have any dependency of foreign owned/managed cloud services or closed source products, and ordering their technical staff to start making changes even if it makes stakeholders annoyed, and yet the keep letting companies like IBM/RedHat and Microsoft pretend they can and should be a part of the digital sovereignty transformation project.
We saw the same when safe harbour collapsed and with the cookie directive where rather then doing something effective they found some way to fix it by changing a few words in an mostly unenforced set of click wrap contracts/licenses. .
The discussions shifts across the board but it takes time to shift due to momentum. The EU has many nations and many more companies all making strategic purchasing decisions. US dependence skeptics belittled earlier have now concrete examples and more weight. The shift can already observed in weapons system purchasing but won‘t be limited to those. For better or worse the US has lost its position of trust and is sadly working on cementing distrust for the next decades.
We saw how fast and decisively modern states can move doing covid, so what is being suggested here is that at the end of the day the current leadership of the EU(especially some of the more US loyal smaller states) is not really ready to believe the US wont restore that trust at the next election.
I am from Denmark and it's been interesting seeing our politicians dance around the very plausible direct invasion threats made by the current US president against Greenland, where our PM made strong declaration while her ministry of defense kept increasing it's dependency on American planes ect.
And it's the same story almost everywhere for the digital sovereignty stuff, yes they claim to want it but when the legislation arrives it's nothing and there is no urgency within the technical departments actually running government it to change anything.
Creating digital sovereignty requires economic protectionism, which directly contradicts a core value of the European Union: bringing down trade barriers.
> contribute to solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty and the protection of human rights [0]
Notably absent from these values are wishes to make the EU more resilient against foreign threats to the global supply chain.
The EU leadership are a very corrupt group who set themselves up to be open to the highest bidders from day one, and those are mostly US corporations and those of other countries when the US hasn't place sanctions on them.
The antitrust fines they impose on those American companies may simply be regarded as a cost of doing business.
When it comes to being indifferent to the welfare of the general populace, they are just as bad as anything else.
This is a weapon that the US has been honing for a long time. Pretty much every modern company has some footprint in the US (for example, maybe trades on a US stock market) and is liable for even mild sanctions violations to the tune of millions at least.
And the EU apparently has the counter ready, which would make such companies liable for millions when they enact US sanctions in the EU.
I'm very curious what would happen then? Nothing presumable, as nothing ever happens, or it might be another step to separate the EU market from the US.
Good. We've been in the age of super national global corporations living playing fast and loose. Maybe this will keep them from gobbling up even more power.
"All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France."
The Law requires that they do it if their (the US) government demands.
If you are asking how it's OK, it's not. It's wrong on many different levels. But it's legal (or at least the US has laws that mandate that same thing, I don't know if they were the ones applied here).
A US company is free to cut off service to whatever foreigner it wants, just like a foreign country is free to ban whatever US firm it wants from operating in it.
Companies can voluntarily close accounts for almost any reason or no reason. The US government needs a legal justification for forcing companies to close an account.
> For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.
So people don't think this is a new thing; when I worked in retail banking in the (very) early '90s it was made clear to us that any transaction in US dollars is subject to US regulation. The hypothetical scenario was that an Ethiopian arms dealer buys Russian product from a German dealer in Switzerland if they do it in USD it is the purview of the US to prosecute that crime.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think that when I was being taught it that it was a new thing.
I worked on anti money laundering for a Canadian bank in Canada. Our scenarios in 2020 were much stricter than stopping illegal arms trading. We were on the lookout for Iranian-Canadian dual citizens sending Canadian dollar remittances to their Iranian families, which would have invalidated the bank’s status as a money service business in the US (which all Canadian banks require due to our integrated economy!) That is, any transaction in any financial institution in any currency (including eg life insurance, mortgages, paypal, etc) is covered by American sanctions regulations if that financial institution does any business in US dollars.
Actually, Israel _was_ a party to the Rome Statute, and thus the ICC. It withdrew its signature in 2002, during the post-Oslo-process intensification of military action against the Palestinians. So, your analogy is flawed.
the scale of destruction in Gaza is horrendous: Its dense cities reduced to rubble, as though after a nuclear strike. The death toll is not yet known. the lower bound - the number of bodies counted by the ministry of health - is at around 69,000, while the Lancet estimated over 186,000 (and that was over a year ago), or nearly 7.9% of the entire population of the Gaza strip. Around 90% of the deaths are civilians (though estimates vary on that point as well).
The US has been participating in this operation, with funding, provisions of services, equipment and most of the weapons platforms, armament and ordnance, diplomatic backing, and even military presence of aircraft carriers and other forces. US tech companies have sold Israel cloud services and various computing solutions; US military, auto and other industries are in on the action as well.
Now we see the US and some of its corporations flexing the imperial muscle to try and deter international institutions for holding Israel accountable.
The ICC has tried several political leaders before, and even convicted and jailed some, but - they were not important enough to US' strategic interests (or if you like, the interests of the donors and backers of the political elite), so the US did not have any such qualms.
Having said all this - it is interesting to note the article does not mention the judge's accounts with Google or Microsoft, e.g. for email or office app services. I wonder if he has any, and whether those have been excepted or whether it's a different story.
It's worth noting that the Gaza Health Ministry is a government agency and the de-facto government of Gaza is Hamas, and therefore the health ministry _is_ Hamas. Casualty numbers released by the ministry have already been statistically dubious, and seeing that Hamas would only benefit from inflating these numbers, it is likely they are not accurate numbers.
It's absolutely not worth noting that because it simply isn't true.
If anything, the MoH numbers are lower than the actual death toll. Even the IDF said internally the numbers were right and their own statistics state that 83% of casualties in Gaza have been civilians.
Indeed, Hamas is the governing party in the Palestinian authority following the 2006 elections. So, the ministry of health is "Hamas-controlled", similarly to how, say, the French ministry of health is "Rennaisance-party-controlled". (Yes, 2006 is a really long time ago and there should have been elections; the split between Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli restrictions, have frustrated efforts to hold them again; and then came the last two years and now who knows what's going to happen.)
> have already been statistically dubious
No, they have not. You're citing an opinion piece in a pro-Israel publication, the author of which has never conducted any investigative work on the matter, and its arguments are rather frivolous.
For a discussion (and refutation) of that claim in the professional press, see:
What _is_ certainy the case, though, is that the ministry is not counting deaths where the bodies do not reach its employees/representatives. And - it is not including deaths which may indirectly caused by the Israeli onslaught. For example, if you die of cancer and you might have gotten treatment had it not been for the destruction of the hospitals and the lack of water, electricity etc. - you are not included in the count.
Chalk up one more to the very long list of why centralizing institutions is a horrible idea because it creates freedom-killing choke points that the flavor-of-the-day hegemon can use as it damn pleases.
In a decentralized world, the US could huff and puff as much as they please, no one would give two fucks.
But when the US have an actual say in every cent that moves from account A to account B in every country that still harbors the illusion of sovereignty ... well your sovereignty does not actually exist.
I don't really have an opinion here, I just find it funny that depending on who is being sanctioned and why, these threads can have very different opinions on the morality and legitimacy of government intervention. For example when the EU imposes on American companies, it's often cheered on. But when the tables turn it's criticized. Regardless of the legitimacy of the complaints, perhaps people can recognize that when you give governments power, they won't always use it in a way that you agree with, and perhaps it's better that they don't have that power to begin with. Just a thought :)
If you do that then the US would respond by doing things like attempting to block EU laws that affect US companies. They're American companies. You can't just block them. American companies won't refuse to follow American law. If you put them in a position where they are forced to either follow American law and European law that are in conflict then they'll be forced to withdraw from the European market.
I'm just wondering. It's only reported the experience of Nicolas Guillou. But they are 6 and most (+3 prosecutors) of them aren't French.
In France, there is the CB system, that can be used in France to pay by card. Outside of France, it's VISA/Mastercard only. So the others judges can't even pay anything by card, even in they own country. I'm not sure they can even get money from an ATM.
> he calls on the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96) for the International Criminal Court, which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. EU companies would then no longer be allowed to comply with US sanctions if they violate EU interests.
Had to go into settings, manually reject each kind of cookie, and then there's no way to confirm, just a way to go back to the first page, and nothing to click but "accept", which seems to imply that you'll end up taking all the cookies anyway. In the end I just closed the tab without reading.
Basically any time you search for information in german, you get this "start an indefinite subscription to open this page" or "confirm that your consent to tracking is freely given" model, which I find highly ironic given that germany is one of the main forces in european lawmaking but then doesn't actually want to comply
This is infuriating. The EU should block US sanctions violating EU interests. I'm also definitely moving my personal stuff out of US and into EU, starting with Gmail.
Exactly! Same here. But man it's going to be a painful move, so much is coupled to that. I already have a GrapheneOS phone, which ironically has to be a Pixel to run it.
Almost every bank in FATF white and gray list countries use the dollar in some way, so although your actions will help, in the end if you're sanctioned and you depend on traditional finance systems you are fucked.
There is a guy on here, weev (username rabite) who was soft sanctioned by the US and can't use banks that transact in the dollar. Last I read of his comments, he was in Ukraine or Transnistria, surviving off of crypto and direct rents from crypto purchased real estate.
There are advantages to having your stuff within your own country's jurisdiction. Only one legal system, and one you already live with, controls this stuff. its easier to go to court. Citizens have more rights than non-citizens in most places.
That’s sanctions evasion and those companies will be very wary in providing services to any close family of a sanctioned person. My guess is that these people’s SOs, children and their SOs are similarly banned, and that siblings, parents and “close associates” have to provide way more documentation when opening bank accounts than you and I.
TLDR: he's a member of the ICC. Issues warrants against Israeli political leaders. Neither Israel nor the USA (nor China, Russia, India) are parties to the international conventions that formed the ICC.
He's being sanctioned as a result by the USA, which flowed down to US companies who must follow US law.
The article continues that he asks for the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96), which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. Activating it would make American companies following US sanction in Europe liable for damages.
I think that is the most important point in the article.
And yet Palestine didn't arrest Yahya Sinwar with accordance to ICC arrest warrant for “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention”. De jure and De facto are very different things.
It is not debatable. Palestine is a recognized member so according to the law they have jurisdiction. If these laws have any usefulness if no one will follow it is debatable though.
If the sanctioned Israeli politicians and military commanders think those warrants are baseless, why don't they appear before the courts to defend themselves?
This isn't really about the ICC judges. It is about the failure of the major Western countries who are part of the ICC to come to the defence of the judges who they have appointed to make those decisions, and the control Israeli politicians exercise over the White House, ie the US President himself.
Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
Sanctions of those kind or usually applied to corporate entities, state entitities or militant political groups aka "proscribed terrorist organizations". They are not intended to applied to individuals carrying out their legitimate duties in organizations approved or even created by America's own allies under principles America subscribes to, even if they are reluctant to submit themselves to those organizations.
And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
> If the sanctioned Israeli politicians and military commanders think those warrants are baseless, why don't they appear before the courts to defend themselves?
Because they aren't under their jurisdiction? Because they might believe the court is biased against them?
> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
> And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
You seems to be confused this is done not for Israel's sake but for USA - they don't want the precedent of non-ICC member's government being judged in ICC to protect themselves.
> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
I mean, it’s causing a small rift in the GOP. Time will tell if that escalates any though. I stand firm in my believe that nothing ever happens though.
Of course they can. Good luck trying to serve and execute that warrant though.
And non ICC countries are squarely within their rights to retailiate. Most minor former colonies of the EU countries can't, but the US, China, Russia can.
> Only the U.S. would actually sanction someone for trying to indict a war criminal.
The problem is that only the US has the power to material harm people to such a degree by doing so.
The amount of control that Big Tech has consolidated into a handful of US megacorporations is a massive danger to the entire world. The US devolving into an overt kleptocracy is a huge threat to freedom everywhere. Who can push back? Obviously not China or Russia, where the problems are even worse.
Of all the wealthy world, the EU basically stands alone as the only entity that has strong enough democratic institutions, capital, and expertise to plausibly develop some kind of alternative.
Trumpian fascists being given power in USA demands that anyone who supports democracy ceases trade with USA. It is no safer than feeding the Russian machine.
I don't think that's true. Lots of countries out there led by thugs. It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing (not that it always succeeded, but it did its best). Looks like that time has passed.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
I think it looked like that, because the US always been very effective at propaganda, and until the internet and the web made it very easy for people to communicate directly with each other without the arms of media conglomerates. It's now clearer than ever that US never really believed in its own ideals or took their own laws seriously, there are too many situations pointing at the opposite being true.
> used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously
The US looked like it stood out but it has its own internal and external legal problems such as slavery, Native American repressions, the legacy of slavery, anti-Asian policies, coup-ing foreign countries, etc etc etc
The US has always been led by Thugs. If you think they ever took international or humanitarian law seriously they would not be scared to join the ICC, and you've only been paying attention to propaganda, not what the US has actually been doing since the inception of those laws.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously
The US took everyone's gold under the bretton woods system, and then Nixon "temporarily" ended dollar gold convertibility when France asked for it's gold back.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
The "The Hague Invasion Act", where the US authorizes itself to invade an ally (the Netherlands) to break war criminal suspects out of prison, was signed in 2002. The US has always been a "rules for thee but not for me" type of place and the digital sanction discussed here fits in a long line of behaviors by the US government. Trump has changed the scale and intensity of it all but the basic direction has always been the same.
Not sure about that. Internally, maybe it was true at some point, cannot say, but if we look at the US as an international player, when exactly was it ready to sacrifice its own interests for any kind of justice or greater good? And if you are not ready to pay the price, then all this talk of a higher moral ground is just that, an empty talk.
The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN. The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy, is completely divorced from the reality of realpolitik and total war. If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
> The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN.
Its been very useful at doing the same thing the ad hoc international war crimes tribunals that preceded it did but with greater regularity and without as much spinup/winddown costs for each conflict they address.
> The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy,
That's not its concept or where it operates, though.
> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
I think you’ve confused the ICC with the ICJ or the UN itself. The ICC does not exist to arbitrate disputes between nations in place of settling them by war.
A leader is difficult to arrest and prosecute while they are in power. But it does have a political cost for them (both being branded as wanted by the ICC, and how complicated international travel becomes, including your host country burning political capital by not arresting you). But of course the real cost comes if you ever fall from power. The ICC means we don't have to invent laws on the spot like we did in the Nuremberg trials for the Nazis, we can use established laws, courts and processes
Of course that's not true. Any country is capable of it, and any country would do it if it were in their interests. Generalizations generally degrade the conversation.
How is is defence relevant in this article? This is abusing of the private sector monopoly of alot of internet infrastructure. Nothing of this is military in nature.
If Europe weren't militarily dependent they'd be less subservient on this and other positions.
As the US becomes less ideologically predisposed to defend Europe, expect the US to take more advantage of the dependency, as the threat to walk away will become more real.
Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal? It’s weird. I mean what even does he get in return for this extraordinary service for someone so undeserving? I can’t even see how it’s valuable for him. Can someone explain it?
> Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal?
A blood soaked FOREIGN war criminal. Why jeopardize american relations with france or the EU over a foreign war criminal? It is amazing the stranglehold one tiny country has over the political, media and financial elites of this country.
I haven't followed in the recent past, but a few years ago, if my memory serves, Netanyahu was largely funded by a group of US Evangelists.
It's not Israel or Zionism controlling the US. It's some subset of US Evangelists using Israel as a puppet for whatever eschatological purpose they have in mind.
My understanding is that Christian extremists, who are voting for Trump, have some belief that some territories needs to be occupied by Jews so that something happens (I don't remember what, but I guess something good to them), so they are happy with the genocide and Trump is happy to collaborate with Israeli government to make his electors happy.
> One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.
> Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.
They think that Jews must be in Israel to enable the return of Jesus and eventually the rapture. I'd love a rapture. Think of the improvement to traffic!
Because that president is also soaked in some of that blood. Just in terms of ordnance alone - Israel would have run out of bombs to drop on Gaza a long time ago in the US were not supplying it with them.
On the personal/political level - Trump's largest political backers in the 2024 campaign have been: Elon Musk, Timothy Mellon, and Miriam Adelson. Musk is an avowed Zionist, Mellon I don't know about, but it is Adelson's $108 Million that come attached with the string of staunch support for Israel and its policies of death destruction and oppression.
"War crimes are defined by the winners. I'm a winner, so I can make my own definition.".
The whole documentary is worth a watch, IMO. It's an incredible look about how people commit heinous acts and build an imaginary world for 40 years to say what they did was "right and justified". Including a scene where the killers imagine they're being thanked by their victims for taking them from godless communism and bringing them to Heaven.
Maybe in 2065 there'll be a version where we'll need subtitles for the Yiddish dialog.
I think the more interesting thing here is the ability to fantasize categories such as genocide
where war can be maximalized into genocide when you don't like the winner, and the genocidal act that has started said war (classic genocide mass killings of civilians by death squads) is appropriated by the perpetrators turned victims
If by "arbitrary law" you mean "don't snipe babies, journalists and the Red Cross" and by "political influence" you mean "actual psychopaths who want the headshot high score"
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This topic is divisive and the thread has quite a few comments on the wrong side of the line, but yours stands out as particularly bad, and you've been doing it in other threads as well:
It would be really, really great when the open Israel hate and borderline Antisemitism displayed in many threads related to these topics could be moderated to the same tune.
It's the same hate that has killed Jewish Americans in the past year.
Many of these replies are very low on facts, very high on emotionally loaded subjective opinions.
It's a challenging task as BBC and so many more Western media outlets had to retract and amend their own faulty reporting over the last few months, but if we're talking about the spirit of the site, everyone should be held accountable equally.
Example at the top of this thread:
> Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal?
It doesn't stop him from what? Living his private life? As the article explains, being digitally cut off from the US is pretty inconvenient in daily life.
> ..... he calls on the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96) for the International Criminal Court, which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. EU companies would then no longer be allowed to comply with US sanctions if they violate EU interests. Companies that violate this would then be liable for damages.
That is from that article..
EU is in a very tough spot right now. They're getting squeezed on all sides economically by USA and China while simultaneously facing a Russian invasion on their eastern borders. The relationship with the American administration has deteriorated badly and any action seen as "retaliation", such as this policy blockade, would almost definitely result in USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war. I think, unfortunately, that will lead to a quick victory for Russia unless EU nations want to put boots on the ground.
It's a bad situation.
It’s kind of hard to see how much more support the US could withdraw from Ukraine, judging by the last article I read that gave Ukraine until Thursday to accept the latest peace deal negotiated between USA and Russia.
If we are in the world you describe, EU might as well do as it wants - its downside has been capped.
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I've been to Kyiv five times to deliver aid via help99.co, and I've spent many, many hours with Europeans driving trucks from Tallinn to Kyiv.
The people volunteering and driving know Europe is at war. They all say nobody else where they live realizes this.
It's frustrating.
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By the way, most material support by the US is actually purchased by other NATO members. The US recycles the facade of support, there is very little actionable support.
From the Russia POV invading Ukraine was a response to NATO expanding there. An imminent invasion of Europe seems outside of Russia’s geopolitical goals.
But Europe’s leaders on the other hand do seem invested in escalating this conflict, a lack of finances notwithstanding.
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Ukraine is not and was never part of EU, FWIW
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>and China
That's the biggest question of the century. Imagine that EU and China make a deal, and they backstab US and Russia respectively. EU and China are physically so far away from each other that there's no way they'd actually run into direct conflict, meanwhile by backstabbing, both of them could easily get what they want. What I'm trying to say is that if you flipped the alliances and aligned EU with China and US with Russia, Russia would collapse within one battle maximum while EU's support would be just enough to push the 50/50 chance of Taiwan invasion towards decisive Chinese victory. Everyone happy - China becomes the world's #1 superpower, while EU remains undisputable #2 and US gets sent back to lick its wounds. Sure, EU might suffer from severing its ties with the US, but if the alternative scenario is US abandoning EU and the latter facing Russia alone, then this stops being such a crazy idea.
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> USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war
USA all but openly support Russia by now.
>USA withdrawing even more support for Ukraine in the war
I thought the only way USA was supporting Ukraine was by no longer refusing to sell them extraordinarily expensive weapons. So, no longer [openly] hampering them.
> unless EU nations want to put boots on the ground.
Is such a thing even possible in the EU? I understand that it's an economic and policy bloc. Does Brussels have the authority to raise an army from EU members?
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This is quite a romantic way to describe EU shooting itself in the foot with corrupt politicians and myopic policies.
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It's a bad situation allright, but sucking up to Trump even more isn't going to make things better. Europe needs to grow a pair, help Ukraine way more, and be prepared to fight Russia sooner rather than later.
In France recently the army chief-of-staff declared that we must be prepared to "lose its children" in a war, if it wants to avoid it. Of course we should. The resulting outcry may be a sign we've already lost.
Depends on the point of view.
I see it as a great opportunity, that we in the EU get our shit together, to not be dependant on the US anymore. Nor russia. Nor china.
So far we still can afford the luxory of moving the european parliament around once a month, because we cannot agree on one place. Lots of nationalistic idiotic things going on and yes, if those forces win, the EU will fall apart.
If russia graps most of Ukraine, this would be really bad(see the annexion of chzech republic 1938, that gave Hitler lots of weapons he did not had), but it is totally preventable without boots on the ground (russia struggles hard as well). Just not if too many people fall for the russian fueled nationalistic propaganda.
As a European I can agree with the US and China stuff. But a Russian Invasion? Seriously?
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Both USA and China are having much worse systemic economical issues than EU.
The EU is not facing a Russian invasion on their Eastern border. It (or perhaps we should say NATO) is participating in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
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A referendum about whether the EU should "put boots on the ground" seems like a good idea to me as long as only those who vote yes get deployed.
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I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Could you please explain it?
Im going to go ahead and predict that the EU will not risk it.If it were China ? maybe they would pull the lever to activate this counter.
Previously when the US reneged on the JCPOA viz Iran , they had a similar law/faclity that theoreticall could have been used but never was.
As an addition the EU Commission is currently imposing pretty similar sanction on a Journalist [1] so yeah i dont see much movement on that law being used.Most likely they will try to wait it out.
[1] https://www.public.news/p/eu-travel-ban-on-three-journalists
Thanks for promoting russian propaganda (I mean the framing and source). Unfortunately tolerance has to stop with the intolerant. For anyone actually interested in the substance of why she is banned it seems rather clear and reasonable from the official EU Council decision. These decisions always end in front of the courts, so they only can list things for which they have direct evidence; presumably there is this much more - e.g. a good chance that in the background she is being funded by Russia for this work:
> Alina Lipp runs the blog “Neues aus Russland”, in which she systematically disseminates misinformation about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and delegitimises the Ukrainian government, especially with a view to manipulating German public sentiment as regards support for Ukraine.
> Furthermore, she is using her role as a war correspondent with the Russian armed forces in eastern Ukraine to spread Russian war propaganda. She regularly appears in troop entertainment and propaganda shows on the Russian military TV channel Zvezda.
> Thus, Alina Lipp is engaging in and supporting actions by the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten security and stability in the Union and in a third country (Ukraine) through the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference, and through facilitating an armed conflict in a third country.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:L_202...
The more USA is going to use this leaver, the likely they will make this leaver useless in the future. Like with China, when they overused chips leaver which stunted China for a while, but eventually gave them a way to establish their own chip industry. Now that leaver is becoming effectively useless. It will ends up same with EU.
The best China has is an internationally uncompetitive "7nm" fab and that's the best they'll have until they can manufacture EUV machines domestically.
So the EUV blockade has absolutely been effective and the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
I noticed that people love pointing how far AI field has advanced in a few years and extrapolate next few years. While at the same time being dismissive of Chinese semiconductor manufacturing process. In similar vein I also remember claims that TSMC Fab in Arizona can never work, and yet it does. So I don't know man, I wouldn't underestimate what a billion of enterprising people can do. Especially when paired with the system that has a pipeline of funneling smart people into elite schools.
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Okay? There's a lot of chips you can make that aren't the cutting edge. You don't need a 4090 to do AI, as evidenced by all the AI we did before the 4090. You definitely don't need a (random Intel chip) 14900HX to do general-purpose computing, as evidenced by all the general-purpose computing we did before the 14900HX.
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You are ignoring the possibility of technological disruption.
Apple disrupted Nokia and Blackberry. ARM is currently disrupting Intel.
What if someone lands on a break-through using a completely different tech: what if X-ray lithography [1] becomes viable enough that they don’t have to acquire state-of-art EUV machines from ASML?
[1] X-ray lithography was abandoned in the 80s but it is being revisited by Substrate https://substrate.com/our-purpose. They are an American company that hopes to make it commercially viable by being cheaper and far less complex than EUV.
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Apart from gaming and llms, most of the chip applications including all of military and consumer electronics is more than happy with 7nm process, whatever that means (proper nanometers those ain't).
I know some people live in the IT bubble and measure whole reality by it, but that's not so much true for the world out there. They have ie roughly F-35 equivalent, minus some secret sauces (which may not be so secret at the end since it seems they stole all of it).
You are making a mistake of thinking of them as yet another russia, utterly corrupt, dysfunctional at every level and living off some 'glorious past', when reality is exactly the opposite.
So, you're saying that China has chip fabrication capabilities which are on par with the world cutting edge as of 2018:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process
not too shabby of a fall-back.
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> that's the best they'll have until they can manufacture EUV machines domestically.
And how far out is that?
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> the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
And yet, it's anti-PRC shills that are all over social media. Go figure.
They can just throw power at it, you're delusional if you think it's going to hamper them even mid term.
My understanding, which is not complete, is China has done some amazing things optimizing training on slower chips.
Which is cool, but there are limits to the number of times you can do that.
At the end of the day, the little man has to flip the switch.
It's directly analogous to China issuing export bans. They tried this with critical minerals. Critical minerals aren't actually all that uncommon. They just weren't being actively extracted in most places. Now many extraction projects are starting to roll around the globe because it has become clear China was willing to use access to them as leverage.
My guess is that China will be highly reluctant to restrict exports of manufactured goods going forward. Doing so would directly threaten their own power base, just as the Trump administration's actions are currently taking a sledge hammer to the U.S.'s power base.
Ultimately, this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
It is not equivalent. Rare earths are, as you say, not actually that rare, but they are still a finite resource, and the CCP quite publicly discussed that it isn't a good idea to sell their domestic stockpile internationally while a significant amount of their economy runs on it. They raised prices to factor in that future availability might be more important than short-term profit.
The chip ban on the other hand is about R&D and labor, both things that do not diminish over time. Instead, the ban seeks to slow down Chinese advancement in areas relying on those chips, AI in particular. Both measures will lead to short-term issues, long-term lost growth, and mid-term new industries in the respective countries/markets.
> Now many extraction projects are starting to roll around the globe because it has become clear China was willing to use access to them as leverage.
That happened in 2018 too. All the projects at that time broke because China does it cheaper.
The thing that isn't available in most countries isn't the minerals.
> this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
But the threat of using it can tie up a significant amount of your adversaries' resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being
Is that true? I think the "we've actually used this leaver, just once" is much more likely to cause European judges to be extremely trepedatious. There's a difference between sanctioning an entire country and it's most important industries, which will force it to react and fight, and just victimizing a single judge, who Europeans can ignore the plight of.
s/leaver/lever/g
(from context)
I apologize, English is not my first language, so sometimes I am freestyling it.
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Tech is often a winner takes all market, but this will go out of the window if it is seen as a national security issue.
> Like with China
The best example with China is actually their rare earth wolf warrior bullshit. It’s taken a lever that could have been decisive in a war and neutered it.
The reluctance of the EU leadership to so anything materially significant about anything they claim to care about is kind of telling.
It's either that the leadership is so caught up in their own ivory tower bubble of pure rhetoric to realize they havent really put in the logistics to actually affect reality or that they somehow don't really want the consequences of actually changing things.
For this is pretty clear what they need to do to create any real digital sovereignty and yet the seem to not really be willing to take the obvious step of just banning the use of any technology that have any dependency of foreign owned/managed cloud services or closed source products, and ordering their technical staff to start making changes even if it makes stakeholders annoyed, and yet the keep letting companies like IBM/RedHat and Microsoft pretend they can and should be a part of the digital sovereignty transformation project.
We saw the same when safe harbour collapsed and with the cookie directive where rather then doing something effective they found some way to fix it by changing a few words in an mostly unenforced set of click wrap contracts/licenses. .
The discussions shifts across the board but it takes time to shift due to momentum. The EU has many nations and many more companies all making strategic purchasing decisions. US dependence skeptics belittled earlier have now concrete examples and more weight. The shift can already observed in weapons system purchasing but won‘t be limited to those. For better or worse the US has lost its position of trust and is sadly working on cementing distrust for the next decades.
We saw how fast and decisively modern states can move doing covid, so what is being suggested here is that at the end of the day the current leadership of the EU(especially some of the more US loyal smaller states) is not really ready to believe the US wont restore that trust at the next election.
I am from Denmark and it's been interesting seeing our politicians dance around the very plausible direct invasion threats made by the current US president against Greenland, where our PM made strong declaration while her ministry of defense kept increasing it's dependency on American planes ect.
And it's the same story almost everywhere for the digital sovereignty stuff, yes they claim to want it but when the legislation arrives it's nothing and there is no urgency within the technical departments actually running government it to change anything.
Creating digital sovereignty requires economic protectionism, which directly contradicts a core value of the European Union: bringing down trade barriers.
> contribute to solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty and the protection of human rights [0]
Notably absent from these values are wishes to make the EU more resilient against foreign threats to the global supply chain.
[0] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
The EU leadership are a very corrupt group who set themselves up to be open to the highest bidders from day one, and those are mostly US corporations and those of other countries when the US hasn't place sanctions on them.
The antitrust fines they impose on those American companies may simply be regarded as a cost of doing business.
When it comes to being indifferent to the welfare of the general populace, they are just as bad as anything else.
> The antitrust fines they impose on those American companies may simply be regarded as a cost of doing business.
You nailed it right on the head. Those fines are peanuts for big corporations.
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The underlying article in Le Monde: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/11/19/nico...
Archive link: https://archive.is/TleMk
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
There is an English version of Le Monde as well.
This is a weapon that the US has been honing for a long time. Pretty much every modern company has some footprint in the US (for example, maybe trades on a US stock market) and is liable for even mild sanctions violations to the tune of millions at least.
And the EU apparently has the counter ready, which would make such companies liable for millions when they enact US sanctions in the EU.
I'm very curious what would happen then? Nothing presumable, as nothing ever happens, or it might be another step to separate the EU market from the US.
Good. We've been in the age of super national global corporations living playing fast and loose. Maybe this will keep them from gobbling up even more power.
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Ah, now I understand why Cloudflare was down.
"All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France."
How is this legal / OK?
The Law requires that they do it if their (the US) government demands.
If you are asking how it's OK, it's not. It's wrong on many different levels. But it's legal (or at least the US has laws that mandate that same thing, I don't know if they were the ones applied here).
A US company is free to cut off service to whatever foreigner it wants, just like a foreign country is free to ban whatever US firm it wants from operating in it.
Please look up what happened to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras or Costa Rica when they tried banning whatever US firm they wanted.
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The US government is not free to use frivolous sanctions to indirectly make payment processors stop serving a foreigner.
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Companies are generally free to choose who they are doing business with.
They quite literally aren't in this case. They would get fined heavily if they did business with him.
Pretty much all companies only offer accounts without any guarantees, that can be realistically closed on a whim without any mandatory notice period.
The only exceptions are the high end enterprise accounts.
Companies can voluntarily close accounts for almost any reason or no reason. The US government needs a legal justification for forcing companies to close an account.
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> For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.
So people don't think this is a new thing; when I worked in retail banking in the (very) early '90s it was made clear to us that any transaction in US dollars is subject to US regulation. The hypothetical scenario was that an Ethiopian arms dealer buys Russian product from a German dealer in Switzerland if they do it in USD it is the purview of the US to prosecute that crime.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think that when I was being taught it that it was a new thing.
I worked on anti money laundering for a Canadian bank in Canada. Our scenarios in 2020 were much stricter than stopping illegal arms trading. We were on the lookout for Iranian-Canadian dual citizens sending Canadian dollar remittances to their Iranian families, which would have invalidated the bank’s status as a money service business in the US (which all Canadian banks require due to our integrated economy!) That is, any transaction in any financial institution in any currency (including eg life insurance, mortgages, paypal, etc) is covered by American sanctions regulations if that financial institution does any business in US dollars.
Must suck to be subjected to extraterritorial jurisdiction from a body you have never acknowledged the authority of.
The ICC in this case is investigating crimes committed in a party to the Rome treaty, that's not extraterritorial jurisdiction
Even ignoring that one of these cases involves death and destruction and the other doesn't
Your comment can be interpreted in two ways:
1) It must suck for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to be subject to a rogue French judge.
2) It must suck for the judge to face consequences from the US.
> 1) It must suck for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to be subject to a rogue French judge.
How is the french judge "rogue"?
How is a ICC warrant "extra territorial"? It only calls for the arrest of the individual inside ICC member countries.
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I think the ambiguity was deliberate.
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Actually, Israel _was_ a party to the Rome Statute, and thus the ICC. It withdrew its signature in 2002, during the post-Oslo-process intensification of military action against the Palestinians. So, your analogy is flawed.
Yeah. GDPR is annoying as fuck.
Let us remember what this is about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFUkfmnCR7U
the scale of destruction in Gaza is horrendous: Its dense cities reduced to rubble, as though after a nuclear strike. The death toll is not yet known. the lower bound - the number of bodies counted by the ministry of health - is at around 69,000, while the Lancet estimated over 186,000 (and that was over a year ago), or nearly 7.9% of the entire population of the Gaza strip. Around 90% of the deaths are civilians (though estimates vary on that point as well).
The US has been participating in this operation, with funding, provisions of services, equipment and most of the weapons platforms, armament and ordnance, diplomatic backing, and even military presence of aircraft carriers and other forces. US tech companies have sold Israel cloud services and various computing solutions; US military, auto and other industries are in on the action as well.
Now we see the US and some of its corporations flexing the imperial muscle to try and deter international institutions for holding Israel accountable.
The ICC has tried several political leaders before, and even convicted and jailed some, but - they were not important enough to US' strategic interests (or if you like, the interests of the donors and backers of the political elite), so the US did not have any such qualms.
Having said all this - it is interesting to note the article does not mention the judge's accounts with Google or Microsoft, e.g. for email or office app services. I wonder if he has any, and whether those have been excepted or whether it's a different story.
It's worth noting that the Gaza Health Ministry is a government agency and the de-facto government of Gaza is Hamas, and therefore the health ministry _is_ Hamas. Casualty numbers released by the ministry have already been statistically dubious, and seeing that Hamas would only benefit from inflating these numbers, it is likely they are not accurate numbers.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-he...
It's absolutely not worth noting that because it simply isn't true.
If anything, the MoH numbers are lower than the actual death toll. Even the IDF said internally the numbers were right and their own statistics state that 83% of casualties in Gaza have been civilians.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/israeli-intelligence-health-...
Indeed, Hamas is the governing party in the Palestinian authority following the 2006 elections. So, the ministry of health is "Hamas-controlled", similarly to how, say, the French ministry of health is "Rennaisance-party-controlled". (Yes, 2006 is a really long time ago and there should have been elections; the split between Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli restrictions, have frustrated efforts to hold them again; and then came the last two years and now who knows what's going to happen.)
> have already been statistically dubious
No, they have not. You're citing an opinion piece in a pro-Israel publication, the author of which has never conducted any investigative work on the matter, and its arguments are rather frivolous.
For a discussion (and refutation) of that claim in the professional press, see:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
What _is_ certainy the case, though, is that the ministry is not counting deaths where the bodies do not reach its employees/representatives. And - it is not including deaths which may indirectly caused by the Israeli onslaught. For example, if you die of cancer and you might have gotten treatment had it not been for the destruction of the hospitals and the lack of water, electricity etc. - you are not included in the count.
The AP ran a story about how they count:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-mini...
which also includes their record from past Israeli military campaigns against Gaza, vis-a-vis the UN figures.
Additionally, it's crucial to recognize how Hamas's health ministry numbers never distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths
That is true. And Hamas has always had very a imaginative use of statistics.
However, if you look at the few times that IDF published casualty estimates, they were pretty close to the numbers published by Hamas.
That's perhaps one of the saddest things about this war: there are so many casualties that even Hamas doesn't need to inflate the number.
And The Lancet?
Chalk up one more to the very long list of why centralizing institutions is a horrible idea because it creates freedom-killing choke points that the flavor-of-the-day hegemon can use as it damn pleases.
In a decentralized world, the US could huff and puff as much as they please, no one would give two fucks.
But when the US have an actual say in every cent that moves from account A to account B in every country that still harbors the illusion of sovereignty ... well your sovereignty does not actually exist.
A markedly different tone in this thread to the ones discussing Ofcom's attempt to fine 4chan.
The death spasms of a dying empire.
I don't really have an opinion here, I just find it funny that depending on who is being sanctioned and why, these threads can have very different opinions on the morality and legitimacy of government intervention. For example when the EU imposes on American companies, it's often cheered on. But when the tables turn it's criticized. Regardless of the legitimacy of the complaints, perhaps people can recognize that when you give governments power, they won't always use it in a way that you agree with, and perhaps it's better that they don't have that power to begin with. Just a thought :)
> Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France.
as bizarre as it this situation is, similar power was leveraged to deny american it services to a non-european company outside of the eu [1].
of course not involving the exact judge, but this just highlights the geographical concentration of major web services.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44721174
> Judge: EU should block sanctions
If you do that then the US would respond by doing things like attempting to block EU laws that affect US companies. They're American companies. You can't just block them. American companies won't refuse to follow American law. If you put them in a position where they are forced to either follow American law and European law that are in conflict then they'll be forced to withdraw from the European market.
I'm just wondering. It's only reported the experience of Nicolas Guillou. But they are 6 and most (+3 prosecutors) of them aren't French.
In France, there is the CB system, that can be used in France to pay by card. Outside of France, it's VISA/Mastercard only. So the others judges can't even pay anything by card, even in they own country. I'm not sure they can even get money from an ATM.
> he calls on the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96) for the International Criminal Court, which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. EU companies would then no longer be allowed to comply with US sanctions if they violate EU interests.
A cosmic game of uno? i reversed your reverse!
What a terrible site.
Had to go into settings, manually reject each kind of cookie, and then there's no way to confirm, just a way to go back to the first page, and nothing to click but "accept", which seems to imply that you'll end up taking all the cookies anyway. In the end I just closed the tab without reading.
Might be interesting to know that this is one of the biggest news sites in germany and it's also illegal per https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pa...
Basically any time you search for information in german, you get this "start an indefinite subscription to open this page" or "confirm that your consent to tracking is freely given" model, which I find highly ironic given that germany is one of the main forces in european lawmaking but then doesn't actually want to comply
This is infuriating. The EU should block US sanctions violating EU interests. I'm also definitely moving my personal stuff out of US and into EU, starting with Gmail.
Exactly! Same here. But man it's going to be a painful move, so much is coupled to that. I already have a GrapheneOS phone, which ironically has to be a Pixel to run it.
Almost every bank in FATF white and gray list countries use the dollar in some way, so although your actions will help, in the end if you're sanctioned and you depend on traditional finance systems you are fucked.
There is a guy on here, weev (username rabite) who was soft sanctioned by the US and can't use banks that transact in the dollar. Last I read of his comments, he was in Ukraine or Transnistria, surviving off of crypto and direct rents from crypto purchased real estate.
all of the above is true, but just to be clear about who we're discussing, weev is a genuine neo-nazi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#Alt-right_affiliations
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Weev absolutely deserved to be unbanked, and he put himself in that position. He's not some freedom fighter.
Eh it’s not like the EU is some moral paragon either. Trade one overlord for another. I’ll stick with the overlord that’s most convenient.
There are advantages to having your stuff within your own country's jurisdiction. Only one legal system, and one you already live with, controls this stuff. its easier to go to court. Citizens have more rights than non-citizens in most places.
Insane. Luckily he can use a family member to regain some use of these services or by using a trust company, but still.
That’s sanctions evasion and those companies will be very wary in providing services to any close family of a sanctioned person. My guess is that these people’s SOs, children and their SOs are similarly banned, and that siblings, parents and “close associates” have to provide way more documentation when opening bank accounts than you and I.
Pretty sure the news coverage would have mentioned that if that was the case.
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TLDR: he's a member of the ICC. Issues warrants against Israeli political leaders. Neither Israel nor the USA (nor China, Russia, India) are parties to the international conventions that formed the ICC.
He's being sanctioned as a result by the USA, which flowed down to US companies who must follow US law.
The article continues that he asks for the EU to activate an existing blocking regulation (Regulation (EC) No 2271/96), which prevents third countries like the USA from enforcing sanctions in the EU. Activating it would make American companies following US sanction in Europe liable for damages.
I think that is the most important point in the article.
Palestine is party to it and Gaza is part of Palestine
And yet Palestine didn't arrest Yahya Sinwar with accordance to ICC arrest warrant for “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention”. De jure and De facto are very different things.
The ICC could be considered to have jurisdiction over Gaza though. Although obviously that is debatable.
It is not debatable. Palestine is a recognized member so according to the law they have jurisdiction. If these laws have any usefulness if no one will follow it is debatable though.
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If the sanctioned Israeli politicians and military commanders think those warrants are baseless, why don't they appear before the courts to defend themselves?
This isn't really about the ICC judges. It is about the failure of the major Western countries who are part of the ICC to come to the defence of the judges who they have appointed to make those decisions, and the control Israeli politicians exercise over the White House, ie the US President himself.
Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
Sanctions of those kind or usually applied to corporate entities, state entitities or militant political groups aka "proscribed terrorist organizations". They are not intended to applied to individuals carrying out their legitimate duties in organizations approved or even created by America's own allies under principles America subscribes to, even if they are reluctant to submit themselves to those organizations.
And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
> If the sanctioned Israeli politicians and military commanders think those warrants are baseless, why don't they appear before the courts to defend themselves?
Because they aren't under their jurisdiction? Because they might believe the court is biased against them?
> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
> And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
You seems to be confused this is done not for Israel's sake but for USA - they don't want the precedent of non-ICC member's government being judged in ICC to protect themselves.
> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
I mean, it’s causing a small rift in the GOP. Time will tell if that escalates any though. I stand firm in my believe that nothing ever happens though.
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> He's being sanctioned as a result by the USA
As a result of what ? What’s the trigger cause of the US sanctions ?
ICC can’t issue warrants against non ICC countries?
Retribution for acting out of line with those who have this sanction power.
As a result of Executive Order 14203, titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14203
Of course they can. Good luck trying to serve and execute that warrant though.
And non ICC countries are squarely within their rights to retailiate. Most minor former colonies of the EU countries can't, but the US, China, Russia can.
Only the U.S. would actually sanction someone for trying to indict a war criminal.
> Only the U.S. would actually sanction someone for trying to indict a war criminal.
The problem is that only the US has the power to material harm people to such a degree by doing so.
The amount of control that Big Tech has consolidated into a handful of US megacorporations is a massive danger to the entire world. The US devolving into an overt kleptocracy is a huge threat to freedom everywhere. Who can push back? Obviously not China or Russia, where the problems are even worse.
Of all the wealthy world, the EU basically stands alone as the only entity that has strong enough democratic institutions, capital, and expertise to plausibly develop some kind of alternative.
> Who can push back? Obviously not China or Russia, where the problems are even worse.
Why not China or Russia or any other country with the capability? Competition is good even if some or all of the players are bad individually.
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Trumpian fascists being given power in USA demands that anyone who supports democracy ceases trade with USA. It is no safer than feeding the Russian machine.
I don't think that's true. Lots of countries out there led by thugs. It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing (not that it always succeeded, but it did its best). Looks like that time has passed.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
I think it looked like that, because the US always been very effective at propaganda, and until the internet and the web made it very easy for people to communicate directly with each other without the arms of media conglomerates. It's now clearer than ever that US never really believed in its own ideals or took their own laws seriously, there are too many situations pointing at the opposite being true.
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> used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously
The US looked like it stood out but it has its own internal and external legal problems such as slavery, Native American repressions, the legacy of slavery, anti-Asian policies, coup-ing foreign countries, etc etc etc
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The US has always been led by Thugs. If you think they ever took international or humanitarian law seriously they would not be scared to join the ICC, and you've only been paying attention to propaganda, not what the US has actually been doing since the inception of those laws.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously
The US took everyone's gold under the bretton woods system, and then Nixon "temporarily" ended dollar gold convertibility when France asked for it's gold back.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
The "The Hague Invasion Act", where the US authorizes itself to invade an ally (the Netherlands) to break war criminal suspects out of prison, was signed in 2002. The US has always been a "rules for thee but not for me" type of place and the digital sanction discussed here fits in a long line of behaviors by the US government. Trump has changed the scale and intensity of it all but the basic direction has always been the same.
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Not sure about that. Internally, maybe it was true at some point, cannot say, but if we look at the US as an international player, when exactly was it ready to sacrifice its own interests for any kind of justice or greater good? And if you are not ready to pay the price, then all this talk of a higher moral ground is just that, an empty talk.
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Remember all the thuggery and whatever we are seeing now was happening back then.
What has changed is we know about it.
I'm pretty sure no one outside of the US thought of the USA in that way, ever.
> believed in its ideals to do the right thing
Do the right thing to serve their own interests.
> It used to be that the US stood out because it took the law seriously and believed in its ideals to do the right thing
You're in a bubble.
The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN. The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy, is completely divorced from the reality of realpolitik and total war. If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
> The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN.
Its been very useful at doing the same thing the ad hoc international war crimes tribunals that preceded it did but with greater regularity and without as much spinup/winddown costs for each conflict they address.
> The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy,
That's not its concept or where it operates, though.
> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
I think you’ve confused the ICC with the ICJ or the UN itself. The ICC does not exist to arbitrate disputes between nations in place of settling them by war.
If it's so useless, why bother to sanction it?
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A leader is difficult to arrest and prosecute while they are in power. But it does have a political cost for them (both being branded as wanted by the ICC, and how complicated international travel becomes, including your host country burning political capital by not arresting you). But of course the real cost comes if you ever fall from power. The ICC means we don't have to invent laws on the spot like we did in the Nuremberg trials for the Nazis, we can use established laws, courts and processes
> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
That's… kind of the point? To not have to kill and destroy each other to settle disputes.
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"The ICC somehow managed to create an institution even more useless than the UN."
Yet two of the most powerful thugs: Putin and Netanyahu won't go near an ICC signatory state.
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Of course that's not true. Any country is capable of it, and any country would do it if it were in their interests. Generalizations generally degrade the conversation.
I hate to break it to you, but plenty of countries would do this.
One country's war criminal is another country's military hero. Same as it ever was.
Ultimately this sources back to Europe being dependent on the US for defense.
How is is defence relevant in this article? This is abusing of the private sector monopoly of alot of internet infrastructure. Nothing of this is military in nature.
> Nothing of this is military in nature.
Sure... Until Trump says it is.
If Europe weren't militarily dependent they'd be less subservient on this and other positions.
As the US becomes less ideologically predisposed to defend Europe, expect the US to take more advantage of the dependency, as the threat to walk away will become more real.
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The US is becoming an oligarchy run by people who style themselves a modern day Caligula.
Which is all fine and dandy- not my country. But there is a golden rule that had been established between Europe and America.
Do not interfere with internal affairs.
The US is now openly engaged in destroying liberal democracy.
yucky yuck yuck
Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal? It’s weird. I mean what even does he get in return for this extraordinary service for someone so undeserving? I can’t even see how it’s valuable for him. Can someone explain it?
> Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal?
A blood soaked FOREIGN war criminal. Why jeopardize american relations with france or the EU over a foreign war criminal? It is amazing the stranglehold one tiny country has over the political, media and financial elites of this country.
Zionist Jews wield a lot of political power in the US. It’s difficult/impossible to get elected at the federal level if you don’t support Israel.
Supporting Israel is valuable to Trump because many of his donors are these Zionist Jews.
I think that it's actually the opposite.
I haven't followed in the recent past, but a few years ago, if my memory serves, Netanyahu was largely funded by a group of US Evangelists.
It's not Israel or Zionism controlling the US. It's some subset of US Evangelists using Israel as a puppet for whatever eschatological purpose they have in mind.
My understanding is that Christian extremists, who are voting for Trump, have some belief that some territories needs to be occupied by Jews so that something happens (I don't remember what, but I guess something good to them), so they are happy with the genocide and Trump is happy to collaborate with Israeli government to make his electors happy.
Yeah, some Christian evangelicals want Jewish people to go to Israel, build the new temple, and then get wiped out in the apocalypse.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/us-evangelical...
> One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.
> Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.
They think that Jews must be in Israel to enable the return of Jesus and eventually the rapture. I'd love a rapture. Think of the improvement to traffic!
Because that president is also soaked in some of that blood. Just in terms of ordnance alone - Israel would have run out of bombs to drop on Gaza a long time ago in the US were not supplying it with them.
On the personal/political level - Trump's largest political backers in the 2024 campaign have been: Elon Musk, Timothy Mellon, and Miriam Adelson. Musk is an avowed Zionist, Mellon I don't know about, but it is Adelson's $108 Million that come attached with the string of staunch support for Israel and its policies of death destruction and oppression.
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Same is happening to Francesca Albanese, UN rapporteur on Palestinian Territories, Italian citizen.
The US is pure mafia.
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> Same is happening to Francesca Albanese
And nothing of value was lost.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyXExGWGEyw
"War crimes are defined by the winners. I'm a winner, so I can make my own definition.".
The whole documentary is worth a watch, IMO. It's an incredible look about how people commit heinous acts and build an imaginary world for 40 years to say what they did was "right and justified". Including a scene where the killers imagine they're being thanked by their victims for taking them from godless communism and bringing them to Heaven. Maybe in 2065 there'll be a version where we'll need subtitles for the Yiddish dialog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q
I think the more interesting thing here is the ability to fantasize categories such as genocide
where war can be maximalized into genocide when you don't like the winner, and the genocidal act that has started said war (classic genocide mass killings of civilians by death squads) is appropriated by the perpetrators turned victims
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If by "arbitrary law" you mean "don't snipe babies, journalists and the Red Cross" and by "political influence" you mean "actual psychopaths who want the headshot high score"
if by reality i mean "invented stories in scare quotes"
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This topic is divisive and the thread has quite a few comments on the wrong side of the line, but yours stands out as particularly bad, and you've been doing it in other threads as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It would be really, really great when the open Israel hate and borderline Antisemitism displayed in many threads related to these topics could be moderated to the same tune.
It's the same hate that has killed Jewish Americans in the past year.
Many of these replies are very low on facts, very high on emotionally loaded subjective opinions.
It's a challenging task as BBC and so many more Western media outlets had to retract and amend their own faulty reporting over the last few months, but if we're talking about the spirit of the site, everyone should be held accountable equally.
Example at the top of this thread:
> Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal?
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46006941&goto=item%3Fi...
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Everything related to I/P conflict tends to draw lowly informed and heated discussion.
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This reminds me of the old gangster trick of having their "ho hold the strap" because they're a prohibited person who can't have guns.
It doesn't stop him, merely means anything requiring an actual identity is likely done by proxy of his wife/mistress/cousin.
It doesn't stop him from what? Living his private life? As the article explains, being digitally cut off from the US is pretty inconvenient in daily life.
I'm going to take the kindest interpretation and deduce you've read basically nothing of what I've said beyond those four words.