Gergely Gulyás, the Chief of Staff for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, said on Thursday that if Russian President Vladimir Putin were to enter Hungary, he would not be apprehended despite the arrest warrant issued International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague.

The 123 member states of the ICC under Article 89 of the Statute, after the Court ‘transmit[s] a request for the arrest and surrender of a person…shall, in accordance with the provisions of this Part and the procedure under their national law, comply with requests for arrest and surrender.’

Although Hungary is a signatory to the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the ICC, and ratified it in 2001, Gulyás said apprehending Putin would have no basis in Hungarian law:

‘We can refer to the Hungarian law and based on that we cannot arrest the Russian President … as the ICC’s statute has not been promulgated in Hungary.’

The Alleged Crimes

Putin is just the third head of state to be indicted by the ICC while still in power. The other two were Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Libyan Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The ICC’s arrest warrant came after it concluded that Putin had committed war crimes in connection with the abduction and deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, which would be a violation of Article 6 (e) of the Rome Statute, that of  ‘[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.

The ICC found that the Russian leader bore personal criminal responsibility for the forced “resettlement” of Ukrainian children—it is also seeking the apprehension of Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, who has been the public face of a Kremlin-sponsored programme in which Ukrainian children and teenagers have been taken to Russia.

According to The New York Times, as Russian forces laid siege to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last spring, children fled bombed-out group homes and boarding schools. Separated from their families, they followed neighbours or strangers heading west, seeking the relative safety of central Ukraine. They were intercepted at pro-Russian checkpoints, put in buses, transferred to other Russian-held territories, and eventually to Russia.

‘I didn’t want to go,’ said fourteen-year-old Anya, who escaped a home for tuberculosis patients in Mariupol and is now with a foster family near Moscow. ‘But nobody asked me.’

Russian officials have not denied the arrival of Ukrainian children in the country, though they categorised the children’s centres as part of a humanitarian programme for abandoned, war-traumatised orphans.

While Putin is responsible for unjustly invading a sovereign and independent nation, to say nothing of the deaths, displacement, torture, etc. his soldiers inflicted on the Ukrainians,

the ICC’s warrant for his arrest is nothing else but a hypocritical melodrama.

What About These Crimes?

In 2020, the ICC accused so-called ‘elite’ Australian soldiers of having allegedly murdered scores of Afghan civilians, including slicing children’s throats as part of an initiation ritual. Yet the International Criminal Court has never charged any of the suspects involved for war crimes. (Editor’s note: The first of the special forces troops believed to be responsible for the purported crimes was charged on 20 March this year in New South Wales, according to a joint statement from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI).)

The same can be said for Israeli and Palestinian officials who authorised attacks during the May 2021 fighting in the Gaza Strip and Israel that violated the laws of war and apparently amount to war crimes. Israeli troops killed 62 Palestinian civilians where there were no evident military targets in the vicinity, while Palestinian armed groups launched more than 4,360 unguided rockets and mortars toward Israeli population centres, violating the prohibition against deliberate or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

And let us not forget that while most of the world has rightly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, twenty years ago the United States invaded Iraq on false information that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not only possessed weapons of mass destruction, but that he had a direct link to and was harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists, the jihadists responsible for the tragedies on 11 September 2001.

The tragic results cost several thousand US soldiers’ lives—4,550 service members and 3,793 military contractors died between March 2003 and October 2018—, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens lost their lives, and once the US left Iraq, leaving it ungovernable, it paved the way for the self-proclaimed Islamic State to take over the Levant.

To add insult to injury, as reported by Sohrab Ahmari, a contributing editor of The American Conservative:

‘[T]he Bush administration created conditions for an orgy of looting that ravaged, among many other things, Iraq’s priceless archaeological patrimony. Some 15,000 objects were taken from the national museum during 36 hours of looting in April 2003; more than half have yet to be recovered. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joked.’

Last, but not least, what about the war crimes committed by Ukrainian troops? Videos showing inflicting wounds on and executing Russian prisoners of war have emerged, but there has been no reaction on the part of the ICC.

And on 2 September 2020, Washington accused the ICC of being ‘broken and corrupted’ and derailed a probe into possible war crimes committed by US forces and CIA personnel in Afghanistan. In a quid pro quo, the ICC dropped the probe after then President Donald Trump said he would not impose sanctions.

Why has the ICC not followed up on any of these situations?

What is Next?

While the Biden administration hails the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin, it has yet to state if the US, even though it is not a member of the Court, would put the Russian leader in handcuffs if he were to enter America. Obviously, no American would ever be under the custody of the ICC ever since Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both prohibited US funding of the ICC and barred the United States from assisting the court. Washington went so far as to authorise military action to secure the release of any American personnel detained by or on behalf of the tribunal.

Undoubtedly, Orbán will undergo an entire array of defamation for not complying with the ICC’s demand. This is something I cannot judge him one way or the other, despite Putin invading an independent and sovereign nation, in which innocent civilians have been killed and tortured.

Yes, I do believe Putin should be held accountable for what he has done, but as the saying goes, ‘you can’t have your cake and eat too’. In other words, if the Russian leader is going to be apprehended, then the ICC better issue an arrest for so many others, as well. The fact that the ICC did not press charges on the aforementioned individuals, but is doing so against Putin is a both sanctimonious and disturbing.