[Salon] ICC prosecutor seeks warrants for Taliban leaders over persecution of women

FM: John Whitbeck

Last month, I wrote (https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/05/a-strategically-timed-icc-arrest-warrant) that ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan's announcement that he was seeking an arrest warrant against Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Myanmar's military junta, appeared to be a strategically timed effort to defend himself, his family and the ICC as an institution against "American politicians of both parties who have been promising to impose sanctions on the ICC, its Prosecutor, its judges and their families as punishment for the ICC's 'outrageous' issuance of arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant."

This effort appearing to have had no effect on American politicians, Karim Khan has today announced, as reported in the article at the link transmitted below, that he is seeking an arrest warrant against the top leader of the Taliban and an associate.

As I noted in a prior article (https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/21/on-the-icc-putin-netanyahu-and-prosecutorial-discretion), Khan was able to achieve the lifting by the Biden administration of the first Trump administration's sanctions against the ICC, his predecessor as Prosecutor and her family only by promising not to pursue potential American war crimes in Afghanistan -- and, whatever one may think of the Taliban (and there is precious little to like about them), they were resisting a foreign invasion and occupation of their country, not perpetrating one.

There is little reason to hope that the latest, justified arrest warrants being sought by Karim Khan will have any impact on American politicians, for whom arrest warrants against the rulers of Russia, Myanmar and Afghanistan are irrelevant if the ICC has committed the lèse majesté of indicting leaders of the foreign country that owns them.

Realistically, unless a New Free World soon mobilizes its forces in resistance, the Israeli/American Empire is on the verge of definitively destroying any concept of international law and restoring "Might makes right" as the only functioning concept in international relations.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/23/icc-prosecutor-applies-for-arrest-warrants-for-two-taliban-leaders