Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, has just put the International Criminal Court in a position where it must charge him with war crimes if it is to retain even a shred of credibility.
In the absence of such action, the ICC must be dismissed as illegitimate and quite possibly corrupt, as alleged by Senator Lindsey Graham.
Why must the ICC issue a warrant for Khamenei's arrest when Iran is not a signatory to the Rome Statute?
When the ICC issued a warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even though Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute either, it put itself on written record as claiming enforcement authority over non-signatories to the Rome Statute.
We therefore demand that it exercise the authority it has claimed over Iran's Khamenei, or else lose its authority entirely and that includes over signatories.
Khamenei stipulated in writing on X that he and others in his government are guilty of war crimes as defined by the Rome Statute, so the ICC is now obliged to arrest him.
Image: Screen shot from X
As translated by Grok, "We thank God who aided our armed forces, enabling them to penetrate the advanced, multi-layered Zionist defenses and level many of their civilian and military sites to the ground." If I copy and paste the Arabic into Google's translator, I get essentially the same thing.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as war crimes: "(b) Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts: (i) Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities; (ii) Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives …" and Iran's Supreme Leader posted to social media that his armed forces leveled civilian targets to the ground.
As the ICC has already claimed jurisdiction over countries like Israel that have not signed the Rome Statute, and it is aware of a war crime to which Iran's "supreme leader" admitted openly on social media, it must now either charge him and his associates accordingly or lose forever its credibility and authority throughout the world.
Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. He or she is remaining anonymous due to being subjected to "cancel culture" for denouncing Black Lives Matter's incitement of civil disorder.