The U.K. has announced that it is no longer going to pursue its legal challenge to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) seeking of arrest warrants for key Israeli leaders behind the Gaza genocide, helping to clear the way for the warrant to be issued.
A spokesperson for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the new Labour government believes in international law and the separation of powers when it comes to the ICC’s determinations.
“This was a proposal by the previous government which was not submitted before the election, and which I can confirm the government will not be pursuing in line with our long-standing position that this is a matter for the court to decide,” the Starmer spokesperson said.
Pro-Palestine groups expressed relief over the decision, saying that it is an important step toward acknowledging the jurisdiction of the ICC to investigate war crimes. They said, however, that recognizing the ICC is far from enough and that the U.K. must itself follow international law and stop providing Israel with military support — or else risk being complicit in the alleged war crimes that the ICC and International Court of Justice are prosecuting.
Under the former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the U.K. had planned to submit a challenge to the ICC’s seeking of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This challenge would have delayed the issuing of the warrants, which ICC prosecutor Karim Khan submitted a request for in May over Israel’s wide-ranging atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza.
Sunak’s government had said that it was going to question the ability of the ICC to arrest Israeli nationals due to provisions in the Oslo Accords that it argued prevented Palestine from delegating power to the ICC to do so. The ICC’s deadline for the U.K.’s filing was Friday.
Human rights groups had urged the U.K. to drop its challenge ahead of the announcement, saying it was a crucial test for the new Labour government in its stance on the Gaza genocide and Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Though the U.K’s challenge was a significant hurdle for the arrest warrants, the ICC has allowed over 60 governments and groups to file challenges to both the warrant requests for Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders, which will still delay the issuing of arrests. The deadline for these filings is August 6.
The decision to not file the challenge is one in a series of departures from the Conservative government’s policies that the new government has made on the issue of Gaza and Palestine at large.
Crucially, this month, the country announced that it is restoring funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). UNRWA is the most crucial humanitarian aid agency serving Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and beyond, and has suffered relentless attacks from Israeli officials throughout Israel’s genocide and for decades beforehand.
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