Budapest: Hungary was never fully committed to the International Criminal Court, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday, a day after his government announced a decision to quit the global tribunal for war crimes and genocide.
Speaking on state radio, 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 ICC arrest warrant. “Hungary has always been half-hearted” in its ICC membership, said 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 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,” Orbán 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 Netanyahu’s arrest in November on suspicion of crimes against humanity. a