Palestine and the ICC: besides breaching the Oslo Accords, it also - TopicsExpress

Palestine and the ICC: besides breaching the Oslo Accords, it also delays the peace After the collapse of the last peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, due among other reasons to the late list of demands that Mahmoud Abbas presented as a condition for further negotiations and the initiative to join 15 international organizations, Mahmoud Abbas tried to get the recognition of Palestine as a State in the U.N. Security Council. Following the negative vote, on January 2 at the headquarters of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in New York, the Palestinian ambassador in the U.N., Riyad Mansour, submitted the official application for membership, which included the signature adherence to the Rome Statute and 17 other international treaties. Bank Ki-Moon announced that Palestine, which is recognized in the UN General Assembly as an observer state, will be eligible to join the ICC, thus becoming a full member of the Court on 1 April. The U.N. has applied, once again, political pressure against Israel without requiring any effort or compromise from the Palestinians. By taking this step, Mahmud Abbas breaches two specific commitments that the Palestinians made in the Oslo Accords: not to seek a final status determination outside the negotiations and giving Israel exclusive jurisdiction over its nationals in the territories, as the international lawyer Eugene Kontorovich has reminded. However, this measure, one more in the political offensive that the Middle East analyst Aaron David Miller has described as the Diplomatic Intifada, will not bring any positive results neither the Palestinians nor the peace process. Plus, as Miller pointed out, it is clear that the ICC believes that meddling in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will enhance its credibility and political reputation. Nonetheless, there are some issues that Abbas evaded. In one hand, using the ICC as political tool against Israel can backfire against Abbas’s purposes. The extension of ICC jurisdiction to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza can expose Palestinians to prosecutions as much as Israelis, and the ICC could begin by prosecuting members of Hamas for war crimes, as the Criminal Law Professor of the University of London Kevin Jon Heller has suggested. On the other hand, according to Dennis Ross, former US chief negotiator for Arab-Israeli issues, the Palestinian membership in the ICC will not alter the reality on the ground; on the contrary it will enlarge the status quo and accordingly will delay the peace process.