QUESTION PERIOD — Global Affairs
International Criminal Court
May 28, 2024
My question is a follow-up, in some ways, to the question earlier about the government’s response to the International Criminal Court, or ICC, prosecutor’s request for five warrants — three for Hamas leaders and two for Israeli leaders. As part of my question, I want to reference the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the fact that they are indivisible — that all human beings in this world have equal rights. Therefore, they have equal rights to accountability under the Rome Statute, which the Government of Canada — in particular then foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy — led. In many ways, the anchoring of the ICC has been Canadian since the first leader.
Therefore, my question is this: How does the government justify not supporting the ICC prosecutor’s right and responsibility to request those warrants?
Thank you for your question.
The Government of Canada does not take the position that the prosecutor does not have the right to request this. Thank you for underlining the actual stage of the process we’re at.
The Government of Canada was an early founding supporter of the ICC and respects its jurisdiction. However, that doesn’t mean that the Government of Canada is prepared to take a position in advance of the decision of the judges faced with the request of the prosecutor. In that regard, as I tried to point out in the earlier question — and as a jurist, you would understand — there are actual legal requirements the ICC judges have to — and, one expects, will — take into account in evaluating this. We’ll have to wait and see how they apply those criteria in their decision making.
I have a quick supplementary, which is to point out that if we look at the statements by the representatives of the government thus far in responding to the prosecutor’s request for the warrants, we see an equivocation and a differentiation appearing in their language between the Hamas leaders and the Israeli leaders. How can this be justified?
I think it is very easily justified, if I may. Here I can cite Irwin Cotler indirectly in a piece that he published in The Times of Israel. Hamas is a terrorist organization; it is not a state. It has a genocidal ideology that is long-standing. Israel is a democracy with one of the most vibrant legal systems in the world. The ICC statute requires it to defer to those countries that have domestic —
Thank you, senator.
