The US was involved in the process of creating the International Criminal Court, and then-President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute, the court’s founding treaty, in 2000. But Washington’s membership was never ratified.
Two years later, former President George W Bush informed the UN that the US had no intention of becoming a member state of the court, saying he feared politically motivated prosecutions of US soldiers. Since then, successive US administrations have oscillated between adversarial and tentatively supportive approaches towards the court.
Critics have charged that Washington’s arms-length policy has continued to undermine the tenets of international justice.
Coming into office, the Biden administration with its emphasis on multilateralism increased hope that Washington would embrace the court. In 2021, Biden removed sanctions placed on two ICC officials by former President Donald Trump.
Last year, Biden ordered US agencies to share evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine with the ICC. Biden later welcomed the court’s issuance of an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But the Biden administration’s condemnation of ICC Prosecutor Khan’s request for arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders shows “quite conclusively that the United States has consistently, persistently displayed selective moral outrage against ICC investigations”, according to international law expert Joanna Rozpedowski.
The result, she told Al Jazeera, could be “further fragmentation within the international system that can potentially damage, delegitimise the international legal system Western countries co-created”.
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