The French Foreign Ministry advanced two claims as the rationale for its decision to support the International Criminal Court — both equally risible and ridiculous.
One of the most blatant examples of this was the recent support France expressed for the decision by the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. On May 20, the French Foreign Ministry stated it supported the independence of the ICC and its "fight against impunity."
What is particularly galling about Paris' decision is that France has, arguably, the worst post-World War II record of any Western nation regarding preservation of human rights, with a chronicle of gory atrocities stretching from Indochina to North Africa. Regarding the first "impunity," as Col.
After all, if that means granting the ICC unlimited discretion to make any fanciful decision, unshackled by constraints of veracity or fairness, what is to prevent it from sentencing some luckless defendant to be burned at the stake for disputing that the world was flat? Or that Israel was "using starvation as a weapon ... in Gaza" despite regular conveys of trucks bringing in thousands of tons of food to Gaza's population.
Ironically, Paris is trying to shore up lingering remnants of its colonial past by undermining the indigenous population of its Pacific possessions of New Caledonia. Indeed, its anti-Azerbaijan animus appears to lurk behind its claims that Baku instigated recent pro-independence rioting.