Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, defying the ICC’s arrest warrant against him, has arrived in Hungary. The country’s government has declared that they will be withdrawing from the International Criminal Court (ICC) just before Prime Minister Viktor Orban was set to meet with Netanyahu, who is currently the subject of an ICC arrest warrant.

Hungary’s move to withdraw from the ICC is in response to the court’s arrest warrant issued against Netanyahu. The government will initiate the withdrawal process on Thursday, following the constitutional and international legal framework.

Netanyahu’s arrival in Budapest marks his first trip to Europe since 2023 and his defiance of the ICC’s arrest warrant against him.

In November, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban extended an invitation to Netanyahu just a day after the ICC announced the arrest warrant for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Orban vowed that Hungary, as an EU member and ICC member, would not execute the warrant, stating that the court’s decision “intervenes in an ongoing conflict… for political purposes.”

The ICC has criticized Hungary’s decision to defy the warrant for Netanyahu, with the court’s spokesperson, Fadi El Abdallah, stating that it is not up to the member states of the ICC “to unilaterally determine the soundness of the Court’s legal decisions.”

Hungary signed the Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the ICC, in 1999 and ratified it two years later during Orban’s first term in office. However, the country has not implemented the associated convention for constitutional reasons and has claimed that it is not obligated to carry out ICC rulings.

The ICC, established in 2002, relies on the cooperation of its member states to enforce its decisions, as it has no police force of its own.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/3/hungary-says-it-will-withdraw-from-icc-as-israels-netanyahu-visits?traffic_source=rss