Comment by jameshilliard

> The Israeli guy might even be out of power at the end of the month.

Yeah, although his replacement would be highly unlikely to hand him over to the ICC either.

> They of course didn't just issue warrants for heads of state, although the same analysis probably applies to the other accused.

They did also issue warrants for some dead Hamas terrorists I guess.

> Ultimately i think it was an ideological stand - The ICC prosecutor wanted to say nobody is above the law, even if practically there are limits.

Could be, could also be he needed a distraction from his own misconduct investigation[0] or a bit of both. From what I've seen he rushed a very weak case but it's hard to say exactly why, could be for political reasons. Ultimately it probably just makes the ICC look weak since the warrants would be highly unlikely to be executed.

> Governments change, but treaty obligations stay.

When governments change treaty obligations tend to mostly matter to the degree they are enforce in practice.

> They could have withdrawn at any point (with 1 year notice) if they felt like it. they still havent.

Well...apparently they can't because the Taliban is not UN recognized.[1]

> The main point of withdrawing is rescinding the ICC's permission to use the states soverign ability to prosecute crimes as a basis of jurisdiction. Like yeah, there is also the cooperating in apregending fugitives bit as well, but that was always mostly on the honor system.

I mean, the apprehending fugitives part is kind of important, since that's the enforcement mechanism. Clearly the honor system doesn't seem to be working all that well.

> In most cases the situation is more that the accused has either fled or otherwise not present in the territory, which is pretty normal for courts.

I guess that has happened a bit in Africa, with how dysfunctional the courts there can be I can see cases where something like the ICC would make sense. On the other hand most of the middle east never became member states so it's rather useless there.

> Like with ukraine, i'm sure ukraine would have no problem prosecuting putin if he presented himself to ukraine. The issue is he is at large outside of the territory.

Well they would probably do that themselves rather than hand him over to the ICC. From my understanding ICC is generally only supposed to step in if local courts fail to act.

> In many ways, the ICC is best viewed as an extradition pact with its own court.

Which I guess is the main problem, the enforcement mechanism is kind of terrible, paired with the ICC seemingly deliberately trying pretty hard to stretch their jurisdiction makes them look like they are just playing political games a lot of the time.

The court probably shouldn't be making threats of arrest it can't carry through on. Similar to how Trump was making threats against Iran that he clearly wasn't willing to carry out made him look weak when they called his bluff.

[0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1168025

[1] https://www.ejiltalk.org/unrecognized-governments-and-the-ic...