Orban says Hungary quitting ICC to end its ‘half-hearted’ membership

Hungary was never fully committed to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said.

His comments come a day after his government announced a decision to quit the global tribunal for war crimes and genocide.

Speaking on state radio, Mr Orban offered justification for why Hungary did not detain Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday when Israel’s Prime Minister arrived in Budapest for a state visit, despite an active ICC warrant for his arrest.

“Hungary has always been half-hearted” in its ICC membership, said Mr Orban, who on Thursday said the ICC was “no longer an impartial court, not a court of law, but a political court”.

Hungary joined the ICC during Mr Orban’s first term as prime minister in 2001.

“We signed an international treaty, but we never took all the steps that would otherwise have made it enforceable in Hungary,” Mr Orban said, referring to the fact that Hungary’s parliament never promulgated the court’s statute into Hungarian law.

The court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued a warrant for Mr Netanyahu’s arrest in November on suspicion of crimes against humanity for his conduct of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

Signatories to the ICC, such as Hungary, are required to arrest any suspects facing a warrant if they set foot on their soil.

The ICC and other international organisations have criticised Hungary’s defiance of the warrant against Mr Netanyahu.

Days before the Israeli leader received a red carpet welcome with full military honours in Hungary’s capital, the president of the court’s oversight body wrote to the government in Hungary reminding it of its “specific obligation to comply with requests from the court for arrest and surrender”.

Judges at the ICC have in the past dismissed similar arguments that failure to promulgate the court’s statute exempts countries from complying with its rulings.

Hungary’s decision to leave the ICC, a process that will take at least a year to complete, will make it the only country in the 27-member European Union that is not a signatory to the court. With 125 current signatory countries, only the Philippines and Burundi have ever withdrawn from the court as Hungary intends.

The Hungarian leader, regarded by critics as an autocrat and the EU’s most intransigent spoiler in the bloc’s decision-making, is seen as using some of the tactics that Mr Netanyahu has been accused of employing in Israel: subjugation of the judiciary, antagonism toward the EU, and cracking down on civil society and human rights groups.

He is also an ally of US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, both critics of the ICC.

In March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Mr Putin for war crimes, accusing him of responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.

Mr Trump issued sanctions against the court in February over its investigations into Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, which began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Octoer 7 2023, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages.

Israel’s response has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, many of them children. In resuming its offensive in Gaza last month, shattering a ceasefire, Israel halted all imports of food, fuel and humanitarian aid to the territory’s two million Palestinians to pressure Hamas to release more hostages and accept proposed changes to the truce agreement.