ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, in his statement today, thanked the team of legal advisors, naming them. The group also published an article in London’s Financial Times today under the title, “Why We Support ICC Prosecutions for Crimes in Israel and Gaza,” which is a very strong defense of the charges.
The make-up of this group includes: former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; former judge at the International Criminal Court; member of the House of Lords; distinguished fellow of international law at Chatham House. These are not low-level lawyers.
They argue: “For months, we have engaged in an extensive process of review and analysis. We have carefully examined each of the applications for arrest warrants, as well as underlying material produced by the prosecution team in support of the application.… In our legal report published today, we unanimously agree that the prosecutor’s work was rigorous, fair and grounded in the law and the facts. And we unanimously agree that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects he identifies have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the ICC.”
They explicitly complain that, “this conflict is perhaps unprecedented in the extent to which it has given rise to misunderstandings about the ICC’s role and jurisdiction, a particularly fractured discourse and, in some contexts, even anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”
