Hungary says it will withdraw from ICC as Israel’s Netanyahu visits | ICC News

BREAKINGBREAKING,

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Hungary in defiance of the ICC’s arrest warrant against him.

Hungary’s government has announced it will withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), just before Prime Minister Viktor Orban was to receive his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, the subject of an ICC arrest warrant.

“Hungary exits the International Criminal Court. The government will initiate the withdrawal procedure on Thursday, in accordance with the constitutional and international legal framework,” Orban’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas posted on Facebook on Thursday.

Netanyahu arrived in Budapest early Thursday morning on his first trip to Europe since 2023 and in defiance of the ICC’s arrest warrant against him.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban extended an invitation to Netanyahu last November, a day after the ICC issued the arrest warrant over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

Orban had vowed the EU member would not execute the warrant, despite being an ICC member, saying the court’s decision “intervenes in an ongoing conflict… for political purposes”.

The Hague-based court has criticised Hungary’s decision to defy its warrant for Netanyahu. The court’s spokesperson, Fadi El Abdallah, said that it is not for parties to the ICC “to unilaterally determine the soundness of the Court’s legal decisions”.

“However, it is not for states to unilaterally determine the soundness of the court’s legal decisions,” he added.

Hungary signed the Rome Statute, the international treaty that created the ICC, in 1999 and ratified it two years later during Orban’s first term in office.

The ICC, set up in 2002, has no police of its own and relies on the cooperation of its 125 member states to carry out any arrest warrants.

However, Budapest has not promulgated the associated convention for constitutional reasons and therefore has asserted it is not obliged to comply with the decisions of the ICC.