Jordan MPs draw plans to sue Israel over Gaza

Author: 
Abdul Jalil Mustafa I Arab News
Publication Date: 
Tue, 2009-01-27 03:00

AMMAN: A Jordanian parliamentary panel has decided on a series of actions to be taken to sue Israeli leaders on the backdrop of the devastating offensive on the Gaza Strip, chairman of the lower house’s Legal Committee Mubarak Abu Yameen said yesterday.

He said that during a meeting late Sunday, the panel decided to give priority for joining a campaign spearheaded by the country’s National Center for Human Rights (NCHR) in coordination with NGOs.

The move aims at directly requesting the prosecutor general of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an investigation and build a case against Israeli officials on charges of committing “war crimes and genocide” in Gaza, he added.

Experts say Israel, in principle, cannot be sued at the ICC because it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute on which the global tribunal was established. However, the motion can be filed with the court’s prosecutor general directly, they said. The Jordanian parliamentary Legal Committee also decided as a second option to recommend that the lower house sue Israeli leaders involved in one of the European national courts in Spain, Britain or Belgium, where municipal law allows them to look into motions against suspected war criminals, Abu Yameen said.

The third option, he said, was to request the Jordanian government, through the lower house speaker, to call for a meeting of the UN General Assembly where the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon should be summoned to provide testimony based on his observations during his visit to the war-ravaged Gaza Strip last week.

The panel’s move came in response to a memorandum by 37 Jordanian lawmakers to the house to sue Israeli leaders as “war criminals who practiced genocide” during the 22-day war on Gaza launched on Dec. 27 that killed over 1,300 people, injured more than 5,000 and destroyed thousands of houses.

The Israeli Cabinet on Sunday decided to provide full legal backing to any of its soldiers accused in a foreign court of “war crimes.”

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