Farewell to Universal Jurisdiction?

As you may have heard over the last couple of weeks there's been a little bit of an argument going on in the middle east between Israel and well most of the rest of the planet over the issue of illegal settlements. Britain's foreign intelligence service, MI6, have little idea about the specifics of this particular argument and have been forced to open a communication channel with Israel in order to find out what's going on. In order to save their blushes they've decided to dress up this fishing expedition as Britain giving Israel severe telling off over the Dubai assassination.

This isn't the first time that Britain has made a big show of getting tough with Israel over the Mossad's use of cloned British passports in that operation. You may remember that shortly after authorities in Dubai released their dossier on the killing the Israeli ambassador to London was summoned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Whilst there he was given such a severe talking too that he was forced to suppress a giggling fit as he left. Unfortunately as Britain is such a great friend of Israel it couldn't possibly embarrass them by questioning their actions like this without some sort of apology for the distress caused. By a stroke of pure bad luck the Israeli ambassadors visit came on the same day that sentencing began on those convicted over the protests outside the Israeli Embassy in London over the war in Gaza. Therefore as an apology to Israel these people, many of them little more then kids, were given exceptionally harsh sentences for participating it what was essentially a state sponsored riot.

Now that Britain has gone one step further by expelling an Israeli diplomat and writing a strongly worded letter to the Israeli ambassador many people are now expecting Britain to make an equally large gesture of apology to Israel. A lot of people think that this will involve Britain exempting Jewish Israeli citizens from the principle of universal jurisdiction. This is a mechanism of international law by which any judge in any country that signs up to it can issue an arrest warrant for anyone formally accused of breaches of international law regardless of where the offence was committed. It was this mechanism that allowed a rouge British judge to issue a warrant for Tzipi Livni back in December 2009 for crimes against humanity that were allegedly committed by Israel during the Gaza war. Since that unsightly international incident Israel has been lobbying Britain hard to do away with the mechanism so serving and former members of the Israeli armed forces and government can continue making visits to the UK without fear of prosecution. Personally I don't think it will happen over this because Israel having been having too much fun over the Dubai case. Besides they understand that Britain is not going to be in any position to prosecute anyone else for crimes against humanity any time soon.