Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently responded “yes” when asked by BBC journalist Mishal Husain whether he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he were in Canada.
Carney, of course, has said a variety of questionable things regarding Israel and Palestine over the last several months, including “I’m aware,” after a heckler shouted “Mr. Carney, there’s a genocide in Palestine!,” as well as calling for a “Zionist Palestinian State,” but this most recent remark takes the cake.
For starters, there are, of course, legal hoops to jump through. Canada has made it clear publicly and directly to both the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC) that it does not recognize a Palestinian state as a “party” to the ICC Statute. As a result, there is no legal or policy obligation for Canada to execute any warrant issued by the ICC Prosecutor, especially following what many view as a deeply flawed process for determining whether the Court has jurisdiction over Israel – a state that is not a party to the Statute.
Indeed, to implement such an arrest warrant, Canada would have to reverse engineer its own legal framework. Ottawa would need to amend portions of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, adjust the ICC Implementation Act, and reinterpret its long-standing declarations to the UN and the ICC to align with the recognition of “Palestine” as a state party. That would mean abandoning decades of legal consistency and undermining Canada’s credibility as a country that respects both the rule of law and its own word. The Prime Minister’s flippant “yes” therefore risks dragging Canada into a morass of legal contradiction for the sake of a sound bite.
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