US-based nonprofit Dawn also accuses ex-secretary of state Antony Blinken and ex-Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin
A US-based nonprofit organization has urged the international criminal court to investigate former president Joe Biden and two of his cabinet members for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
The request, submitted by the Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) last month but made public by the group on Monday, urges the ICC to investigate Biden, as well as former secretary of state Antony Blinken and former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, for their “accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza”.
Last year, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, who was recently confirmed by Hamas to have been killed, for alleged war crimes relating to the Gaza war.
Dawn’s 172-page submission, which the group says was prepared with the support of ICC-registered lawyers and other war crimes experts, alleges that the former US officials violated articles of the Rome statute, the court’s founding charter, in their support for Israel.
According to a press release, the group’s submission to the ICC lays out what it describes as a “a pattern of deliberate and purposeful decisions by these officials to provide military, political, and public support to facilitate Israeli crimes in Gaza”, including “at least $17.9bn of weapons transfers, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, diplomatic protection, and official endorsement of Israeli crimes, despite knowledge of how such support had and would substantially enable grave abuses”.
One passage from the submission alleges that “by continuously and unconditionally providing political support and military support to Israel while being fully aware of the specific crimes committed by Netanyahu, Gallant, and their subordinates, President Biden, Secretary Blinken, and Secretary Austin contributed intentionally to the commission of those crimes while at least knowing the intention of the group to commit the Israeli crimes, if not aiming of furthering such criminal activity”.
Dawn’s executive director, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement that “not only did Biden, Blinken and Secretary Austin ignore and justify the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s grotesque and deliberate crimes, overruling their own staff recommendations to halt weapons transfers to Israel, they doubled down by providing Israel with unconditional military and political support to ensure it could carry out its atrocities”.
The statement also points to the political support the US provided to Israel through its veto of multiple ceasefire resolutions at the UN security council.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump signed an executive order that authorizes aggressive economic sanctions against the ICC, accusing the body of “illegitimate and baseless actions” targeting the US and Israel.
In the statement on Monday, Dawn also stated that Trump’s order against the ICC could subject him to “individual criminal liability for obstruction of justice”.
The group also added that if Trump were to implement his proposed plan to forcibly displace all Palestinians from Gaza and to take over the territory, it would also subject him to “individual liability for war crimes and the crime of aggression”.
Raed Jarrar, Dawn’s advocacy director, said the plan merited an ICC investigation, “not just for aiding and abetting Israeli crimes but for ordering forcible transfer, a crime against humanity under the Rome statute”.
‘It’s the beginning’: Kremlin plays it cool ahead of more U.S. talks, says Biden ‘messed things up badly’
After its initial enthusiasm for the thawing of frozen relations, the Kremlin now appears to be playing it cool over its revived rapprochement with the U.S., saying there is a long way to go to restore the “badly” damaged ties.
“The process that has begun to bring our bilateral relations out of a deep crisis is positive and we support it. But we are still at the beginning of the journey,” Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told CNBC on Monday.
“The previous Washington administration messed things up badly. There’s a lot of work to be done,” he added in Google-translated emailed comments.
Peskov reiterated that position Tuesday, telling reporters that both sides needed to “develop measures to restore and strengthen mutual trust.”
“We’ll have to take numerous small steps towards each other, which will help create and restore the atmosphere of trust. Much damage was done in the past four years and much was destroyed. It’s impossible to rebuild it all in an instant. We have a lot to do,” Peskov said, in comments reported by state news agency Tass.
It’s not unsurprising that the Kremlin might want to tread carefully when it comes to restoring ties with Washington, after spending the last few years flooding the information space at home and abroad with anti-U.S. rhetoric.
Tensions were heightened between Russia and Washington during Joe Biden’s four-year tenure at the White House, as Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted a torrent of U.S.-led international sanctions on Moscow’s elite and economy and pitted Russia and its allies against the West.
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has turned the tide in relations, however, as last week saw the first high-level sit-down talks between U.S. and Russian officials in years, looking to lay the groundwork for Ukraine peace talks. Ukraine and its European allies were left fuming by the U.S. and Russia rekindling diplomatic ties and forging ahead with talks without their input.
The discussions appeared to mollify Moscow, however, and prompt a shift in the mood music, with Russian President Vladimir Putin praising the American delegation and rating the talks “highly.”
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Putin told Russian state media correspondent Pavel Zarubin late on Monday that the White House leader wanted a deal on Ukraine that was not necessarily beneficial to Russia.
“What does [Trump] want to do? It seems to me that he wants to improve the situation, the political situation in Ukraine, consolidate society, and create conditions for the survival of the Ukrainian state. And in general, this is not so much for the benefit of Russia. We still have a conflict with the current regime,” he said, in comments translated by NBC News.
Putin at the time praised Trump’s “rational approach to the current situation,” but said he has not substantially discussed a potential Ukraine peace deal with the president.
Russian foreign ministry officials on Monday announced that a second round of Russia-U.S. talks will take place before the end of this week, possibly also in Saudi Arabia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov echoed these feelings, but again noted that the war would only end when there’s a deal that’s acceptable to Moscow.
“We are ready to negotiate with Ukraine, Europe, and any representatives who would like to help achieve peace in good faith, but we will stop fighting only when these negotiations produce a firm and sustainable result that suits the Russian Federation,” he said.
the U.S. had sided with Russia in opposing a competing Ukrainian and European resolution, put before the wider UN General Assembly, that demanded Russia “completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine.” The U.S. abstained in a separate assembly vote on European-led amendments to its own resolution.
The U.S.′ acting envoy to the UN, Dorothy Shea, later applauded the adoption of the U.S.′ resolution by the UN Security Council, calling the action “the first this Council has taken in three years on Ukraine to firmly call for an end to the conflict.”
Russia’s Ambassador to the U.N. Vasily Nebenzya praised what he said were “the constructive shifts in the U.S. position on the Ukrainian conflict” following the vote, which had also seen Russian amendments to the U.S. resolution, making reference to the “root causes” of the conflict, fail to gain support in the wider UN General Assembly.
“The text adopted now is not ideal, but it is, in essence, the first attempt to adopt a constructive and future-oriented product of the Council, which speaks of the path to peace, and does not fan the flames of conflict,” he commented Monday, saying the adopted text was “only a starting point for further efforts to peacefully resolve the Ukrainian crisis.”
Trump and allies celebrated court orders against Biden they now claim are ‘tyrannical’
President Donald Trump and top allies who have questioned the constitutionality of recent court orders blocking the administration’s agenda touted similar rulings by federal courts as “great news” and “brilliant” when they paused President Joe Biden’s policies.
When a federal judge in Texas halted a Biden administration pause on deportations six days after Trump was inaugurated, presidential aide Stephen Miller took to social media to describe the temporary restraining order as “great news.” When a judge in Louisiana blocked Biden aides from asking social media platforms to remove content, Trump called the decision “amazing.”
“Just last week, in a historic ruling, a brilliant federal judge ordered the Biden administration to cease and desist from their illegal and unconstitutional censorship in collusion with social media,” Trump told an audience in Florida in 2023. (The Supreme Court months later would decide in Biden’s favor.)
Trump has faced a barrage of adverse initial rulings since his inauguration that have paused his efforts to end birthright citizenship, fire leaders at independent government agencies and withhold spending approved by Congress. Those orders are not final but are instead designed to give courts the time needed to review the law.
Still, they can have enormous on-the-ground impacts, and they have allowed Trump’s allies to pour fuel on the notion that his critics are seeking out friendly judges to stall his agenda — just as conservatives often did during Biden’s administration.
The temporary orders, handed down by a single federal judge but often with nationwide ramifications, are exactly the kind of court decisions that the president and his allies are now railing against. Vice President JD Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, carped on social media that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
“Judges should be ruling,” Trump said on the “Mark Levin Show” last week. “They shouldn’t be dictating what you’re supposed to be doing.”
The complaints from Miller, who recently blasted a series of temporary court orders against Trump as “tyrannical,” have been particularly notable because he was heavily involved with seeking them against Biden.
Following Trump’s first term, Miller created America First Legal, a group that frequently sued the Biden administration over its Covid-19 policies, immigration orders and its decision to remove Trump appointees from government boards.
To be sure, presidents of both parties, several justices on the Supreme Court and many legal scholars have long raised concerns about temporary orders that block an administration’s policies. The highest-profile cases are usually tied to politically charged issues, which can make it impossible to have rational debates about the ability of courts to issue sweeping injunctions and restraining orders.
A congressional fix, lamented Notre Dame law professor Samuel Bray, would “require putting aside partisan implications in the near term to solve the problem and get the law right in the long term.”
The real puzzle, Bray said, “is why it has taken so long for the Supreme Court to address this.”
“It may be that the onslaught of cases against the second Trump administration will be the occasion where the court is forced to decide,” he said.
Trump’s complaints may also capture the attention of Congress.
“The real question is whether this will incentivize Congress to pursue the very court reforms that were dismissed as Democratic hyperventilating as recently as last year,” said Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and CNN legal analyst.
Short-circuiting courts
While the remarks by Trump and Vance set off a flurry of debate about the president’s fidelity to the judicial branch and the principle of separation of powers, they also drew attention to a decades-old — and at times bipartisan — fight over court-ordered nationwide injunctions that reach beyond the parties involved in the litigation.
During the first three years of Biden’s administration, courts issued 14 nationwide injunctions blocking executive orders and policies, according to a Harvard Law Review article last year. During Trump’s first term, courts issued more than four times that many.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who served in the first Trump administration, decried nationwide injunctions, writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2019 that granting a single judge such power “short-circuits” the usual judicial process. In the final days of the Biden administration, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar urged the Supreme Court to consider limiting the procedure, arguing in an emergency appeal that the orders can lead to “substantial disruption on the execution of the laws.”
The court declined to take Prelogar up on that offer.
But the litigation now swirling around Trump may give the Supreme Court its best opportunity in years to weigh in on that dispute.
“Sometimes an issue has developed to where it’s at a tipping point and something needs to be done,” said Paul Grimm, director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School and a retired district court judge.
“This may be the opportunity that the court says, ‘All right, the time is right for us to take this on and give some guidance,’ because this is a flash point,” Grimm said. “The chance is greater in the next couple of terms than it has been in the past.”
Several justices waded into the thorny issue last spring in a case dealing with Idaho’s strict statewide ban on gender-affirming care for most minors. The court ultimately allowed Idaho to enforce that ban, knocking down a lower court’s sweeping injunction.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a member of the court’s liberal wing who opposed letting Idaho enforce the law, conceded that “the questions raised by ‘universal injunctions’ are contested and difficult.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by two of his fellow conservatives, described the debate over temporary court orders as of “great significance” and said because the orders are often considered on an extremely expedited basis they lead to a “fast and furious business.”
“Retiring the universal injunction may not be the answer to everything that ails us,” Gorsuch wrote. “But it will lead federal courts to become a little truer to the historic limits of their office.”
Rogue judge vs. wise jurist
Closely tied to the criticism of sweeping temporary orders is a concern that lawyers aiming to shut down an administration’s policies can seek out a friendly judge — or “judge shop” — and virtually guarantee a favorable, if temporary, outcome.
The federal judiciary has tried to take some steps toward addressing that issue, but those measures have met with resistance and mixed success.
Sebastian Gorka, who worked in Trump’s first White House and who the president has named senior director for counterterrorism this time around, reposted a message on X last weekend describing US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, as a “rogue judge.” But he celebrated a nationwide injunction against Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers in 2021 in a social media repost, suggesting that a “Federal Judge” had stepped in to block Biden’s “abuse of power.”
Trump himself repeatedly touted or commented on temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions that blocked the Biden administration’s policies.
When a federal judge in Louisiana in 2022 issued a preliminary injunction halting the administration from ending the Title 42 program, which allowed the administration to speed the removal of certain migrants, Trump reposted a supporter on his Truth Social platform thanking US District Judge Robert Summerhays for the ruling. Trump appointed Summerhays to the bench during his first term.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields dismissed the comparison between the Biden-era orders and those issued in the early weeks of the Trump administration.
“It’s simple: Biden abused his executive power to implement policies not within the scope of his presidential powers, while President Trump is appropriately using his executive authority to implement his America First agenda,” Fields told CNN. “These court orders from left-wing judges are a continuation of judicial weaponization that Americans voted against at the ballot box on November 5.”
While Trump has kicked up considerable dust about federal courts, lawyers in the Justice Department have continued to do what administrations have always done with adverse rulings: Appeal.
Following the uproar over Vance’s tweet, the president told reporters in the Oval Office last week, “I always abide by the courts.”
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