The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has strongly condemned the decision of "Israel" refusing to cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it announced the opening of an investigation into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.
The Euro-Med Monitor said, in a statement, that the Israeli decision resulted from the awareness of the Israeli authorities that its army committed violations that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, which explains its attempts not to cooperate with any international investigations with the aim of avoiding accountability.
The Prime Minister of the Israeli occupation government, Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel promises that the ICC does not have the authority to initiate an investigation against it, and therefore it will not cooperate with it.
The Observatory indicated that the Israeli occupation decision came after the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued a decision on March 3, 2021, to start an official investigation into the alleged crimes committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, since June 13, 2014, which stipulates that Israel is a suspect to commit war crimes.
It stressed that, unlike the Israeli claim that the court is not competent, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC confirmed on January 22, 2021, its jurisdiction to rule only within the territorial jurisdiction of the court in the case of the State of Palestine, a decision that allowed investigations into potential war crimes given that Palestine is a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor called on the ICC to initiate investigations and not to bow to any political pressures or to allow the parties involved to evade responsibility, calling for the need to find mechanisms to achieve justice for victims of violations and hold the perpetrators accountable.
The Euro-Med Monitor called on the European Union countries to support the investigation of the ICC and to ensure the protection of lawyers, witnesses, and civil society activists involved in the investigation and collecting relevant information, referring to statements in which European parliamentarians revealed the prosecution of human rights defenders working on the case.
A member of the European Parliament, Mano Pineda, said that some human rights defenders had received death threats in the Hague due to their work on the file.
