Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, decried the U.N. General Assembly’s overwhelming vote on Tuesday to approve an annual report of the International Criminal Court.
The assembly voted 94 to 10, with 34 abstentions, to accept the report by the judicial body based in The Hague, which is not part of the global body and is distinct from the U.N. International Court of Justice.
The court’s president spoke of the body’s actions in the past year, “including issuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant,” according to the Israeli mission to the global body in New York.
“The resolution praises the court’s work without addressing at all the lack of authority and political bias that Israel has warned about,” the mission stated.
It added that there was a “significant change in voting trends compared to prior years” in the vote, in which Israel, the United States, Argentina, Belarus, Burkina Faso, North Korea, Nicaragua, Nigerm Paraguay and Russia voted against the resolution.
“The court’s rush to reach predetermined outcomes, based on unestablished facts and highly questionable motivations, has placed the leaders of a democratic state defending its citizens from horrific terrorist attacks on the same moral plane as the very terrorists who deliberately target civilians and glorify terror,” Danon stated.
“Such actions inevitably invite responsible states to denounce the court and to question its legitimacy,” the envoy added.
