On April 3, 2025, Viktor Orban, prime
minister of the E.U. state of Hungary, ignored not only the arrest warrant on
Ben Netanyahu, the sitting prime minister of Israel, but also the E.U. law in
the Rome Statute that requires the E.U. states to act on such warrants issued
by the ICC (the International Criminal Court) by arresting people wanted by the
Court. The provision in the Rome Statute of the E.U. requires all state
governments to arrest people who are wanted by the ICC. Orban doubtless knew that he could exploit union’s
vulnerability with impunity because, like the U.S. in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the E.U. relied so much on the state governments to abide
by and implement federal law and regulations. By ignoring the Rome Statute, he
put the E.U. itself at risk.
To put Orban’s defiance in
perspective, Israel’s military had just killed fifty people in Gaza, including
children who could not possibly have been culpable in the attack on civilians
in Israel on October 7, 2023 even though the president of Israel declared after
that attack that every resident in Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to pay the
price in suffering and even wholesale death.[1]
“At least 27 Palestinians [were] killed in an Israeli air strike on a school in
northern Gaza that was serving as a shelter for displaced families,” and the killing
of another 97 people in Israeli attacks over the previous 24 hours” occurred as
Israel’s “ground offensive was expanding to seize large parts of the
Palestinian territory.”[2]
These killings of innocent people took place in the context of “Israel’s cutoff
of food, fuel, medicine and other supplies to Gaza’s 2 million people” that had
been put into effect only months earlier in order to strengthen Israel’s
negotiating position.[3]
That a commission at the UN reported to the General Assembly in March that
there was substantial evidence that Netanyahu was committing the crime against
humanity of exterminating the Palestinian people in Gaza only validates what
common sense alone readily realizes. Bombings, the destruction of hospitals,
intentional starvation, or mass re-location had been documented and evaluated by
the UN as constituting the crime against humanity of extermination of a people.
Also on April 3, 2025, U.S.
Senator Bernie Sanders vociferously called on his colleagues to vote to block
more than $8.8 billion in upcoming arms-sales to Israel, which the Senate overwhelmingly
voted not to ban. “What we are talking about is a mass atrocity, and what makes
it even worse,” Sanders said in his floor-speech, “is that we as Americans are
deeply complicit in all that is happening in Gaza.”[4]
Apparently, political donations from defense contractors mean a lot to U.S.
Senators, though loyalty to Israel could be held to be unconditional, ethically
speaking, to some Senators, for both explanations are likely in play given the sheer
number of senators who voted against banning the very type of bombs that Israel’s
military had been using against even civilian homes, hospitals, and even
fertility clinics.
Viktor Orban ignored the warning that
the E.U.’s executive branch, the Commission, had directed to him in 2024, when
he invited Netanyahu to Hungary.[5]
Not even six months later, Orban welcomed the alleged war criminal to Budapest anyway,
and even gave him a full state-ceremony. Much of the attention on the state
visit was on the fact that Orban was ignoring the ICC’s arrest warrant even
though Hungary was still a signatory as agreeing to the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court. Because ignoring that international court and even the United
Nations had by 2025 become part of the international status quo, as evinced by the
Russian and Israeli governments, Orban’s willful disregard of his duty to have
the alleged war criminal arrested could be greeted with a yawn.
The European Union is different because governmental sovereignty was divided in the founding between the state governments and the Union’s governmental branches, which includes the European Commission. Whereas in the U.S., the sovereignty assigned to the Union is referred to as enumerated powers, the delegated areas of governmental sovereignty of the Union are called competencies. Even the voting mechanism of qualified majority rule, which applies to some of the competencies, means that the E.U. state governments are not sovereign states. Just as when the U.S. was young, the E.U. even as of 2025 still vested most governmental sovereignty as retained by the states. Doing so risks dissolution of the union, as the U.S. discovered in 1861.
Even back in 1831, the government of the U.S. member-state of South Carolina passed the Nullification Acts, whereby that state’s government could unilaterally invalidate any federal law or regulation within that state's borders. I submit that the E.U. state of Hungary did likewise in 2025 when Israel’s sitting prime minister landed in Hungary without being arrested. For as stipulated by the Rome Statute, and a statute is something more than a mere international agreement, the E.U. states are required to arrest individuals wanted by the International Court of Justice if they enter the territories of the respective states. That the obligation is part of the international legal framework on which the ICC relies is qualitatively different than the status of a federal statute of a union in which sovereignty is split (and shared).
Just as U.S. President
Andrew Jackson did not let South Carolina’s nullification law stand, E.U.
President Ursula von der Leyen faced the necessity of seeing that state
governments do not get away with ignoring E.U. law. For if such dismissiveness were
to become the norm, the E.U. itself would eventually fall apart, especially
given the imbalance of governmental sovereignty. Even just to commit the category
mistake of treating a federal system of dual sovereignty as if it were of the
same genus as international organizations is to undercut and even belie the former.
I submit that Viktor Orban was guilty of this too.
It is interesting that so much can
occur on the same day—that even though not causal in nature, combines to furnish
an ethical and political meaning that is like a snapshot of the underlying
dynamics stretching over continents. The sheer impunity of both Netanyahu and
Orban, respecting international law and E.U. federal law, respectively, is, I
submit, a red-flag pointing to the decadence of the post-1945 world order. That
the U.N. itself was largely relegated as impotent to the sidelines with respect
not only to Israel, but also Putin in Russia, can be taken as reason enough for
a new world order. Unfortunately, the tyranny of the status quo has various levers
at its disposal to keep political development from occurring even as fires rage
on the ground.
2. David Gritten, “Israeli Strike on Gaza City School Kills 27, Health Ministry Says,” BBC.com, April 3, 2025.
3. Julia Frankel and Samy Magdy, “Israel’s Cutoff of Supplies to Gaza Sends Prices Soaring as Aid Stockpiles Dwindle,” The Associated Press (apnews.com), March 5, 2025.
4. Sanjana Karanth, “Bernie Sanders Condemns ‘Deeply Complicit’ Congress Before Vote On Weapons Sales to Israel,” The Huffington Post, April 3, 2025.
5. Shona Murray and Jorge Liboreiro, “Brussels Warns Orban over Netanyahu Visit: It’s Your Duty to Comply with ICC Warrants,” Euronews, November 11, 2024.
