US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the Trump administration is working to “dismantle the [International Criminal Court] brick by brick”, throwing down a public gauntlet to the court that issued an arrest warrant in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC - brick by brick, if necessary,” he said.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-does-the-international-court-of-justice-differ-from-the-international-criminal-court
These are not 2 parallel courts. The ICC isn’t performing the ICJ’s duties under better control of “the west”.
The scope of the courts are different, each seems necessary to me.
ICJ settles disputes between CONSENTING parties.
ICC prosecutes crimes.
No wonder the Trump administration wants the ICC destroyed. They reasonably suspect they or their allies could appear before it one day.
The reason Trump admin wants ICC destroyed is the one I explained above. It was created to prosecute leaders inconvenient for the west and was never meant to be turned on western allies like Israel. But ICC was put in an impossible situation where not going forward with the investigation would completely collapse any credibility it still had. So, after doing much hand wringing they tepidly started the case and at that point their usefulness came to an end.
I don’t recall Israel agreeing to a genocide case investigation by the ICJ
The content of my remark presupposes that you read the linked material. It explains clearly the scope of each court and how cases are brought before them.
Israel ratified the Genocide Convention in 1950, which contains Article IX: any dispute about the Convention “shall be submitted to the ICJ at the request of any of the parties.” By ratifying it without reservation, Israel already consented, decades ago, that any other state party could bring exactly this kind of case against it.
Interesting I didn’t know the genocide convention included an agreement to ICJ investigation.
Still the ICC clearly doesn’t every proscecute Western countries committing war crimes when they clearly commit them. The West has committed multiple genocides in the Middle East over the last decades and faced zero repercussions.
Israel directly threatened the previous ICC proscecutor and The Hague did nothing about it. https://nltimes.nl/2026/05/28/icc-prosecutor-says-dutch-govt-nothing-israel-intimidated-hague