The reach and credibility of international law is at its lowest in years as governments dismiss arrest warrants in some of the most high-profile cases to come before the International Criminal Court.

In the past 18 months, the Hague-based court has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and a senior Hamas official.

Netanyahu is the first Western-allied leader to be accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the court. Israel has filed appeals and asked the court to suspend the warrants. Meanwhile, several powerful nations have opted not to enforce the warrants, while others have openly rejected them.

The French response was perhaps the most damaging to the court. Paris had fervently supported the Putin warrant, and reiterated its “longstanding commitment to supporting international justice” after the Netanyahu warrant was issued. But just days later, the French foreign ministry shifted its stance, suggesting that as Israel was not a member of the court, its prime minister could be immune from arrest.

Critics say the responses suggest two sets of rules: one for the West’s traditional allies, and another for its foes.

The founding treaty of the ICC obliges the 124 signatory countries to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant, according to James Joseph, managing editor at Jurist News.

The Netanyahu case was just the latest blow to the court’s authority. In September, Putin traveled to Mongolia without facing any repercussions. Despite being a signatory to the Rome Statute – the treaty that established the court in 2002 – Mongolia extended a red-carpet welcome to the Russian leader.

The trip was Putin’s first to an ICC member state since the court issued an arrest warrant against him in March 2023 for his alleged role in the war crime of unlawfully deportating Ukrainian children.

Lack of consensus

The warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant drew varied reactions from Western states, highlighting a lack of consensus on how to respond to high-profile accusations against allies.

The EU’s then-foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said they are “binding” and should be implemented. Ireland, Canada and the Netherlands agreed. Germany demurred, saying that it shared “unique relations and a great responsibility with Israel,” adding that further steps would be possible only when a visit to Germany by Netanyahu was foreseeable.

Meanwhile, Argentina and Hungary, both members of the court, made it clear Netanyahu was welcome to visit. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the ICC decision was “brazen, cynical and completely unacceptable,” and guaranteed Netanyahu freedom and safety should he visit Hungary.

The US, which never joined the court and has secured agreements with about 100 countries to prevent the arrest of Americans charged by it, condemned the warrants for the Israeli leaders.

The Biden administration’s criticism of the Israel warrants was as emphatic as its support for the Putin warrant. Following the issuance of Putin’s warrant, President Joe Biden said it “makes a very strong point… He’s clearly committed war crimes.”

In France’s updated position, the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement: “France intends to continue working in close cooperation with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the other Israeli authorities to achieve peace and security for all in the Middle East.”

France’s sudden change of direction came after the Israelis made it clear that they would not accept a French role in implementing a ceasefire in Lebanon because of its implied support for the ICC’s arrest warrant.

Human rights groups condemned France’s about-face. Amnesty International said it was “deeply problematic” and ran counter to the government’s obligations as an ICC member.

In shifting its stance, France appears to have taken refuge in Article 98 of the Rome Statute, which holds that a state cannot “act inconsistently with its obligations under international law with respect to the (…) diplomatic immunity of a person.”

Mongolia asserted a similar argument – that as Russia’s head of state, Putin enjoys absolute immunity from ICC proceedings unless Russia waives it.

The court has rejected that claim, saying that another article removes all immunities. A panel of judges reported Mongolia to the ICC’s governing assembly, arguing members of the court “are duty-bound to arrest and surrender individuals subject to ICC warrants, regardless of official position or nationality.” Any other interpretation would “undermine the Rome Statute’s goal of ending impunity for those who threaten global peace and security,” the panel said at the time.

The court’s spokesman, Fadi El Abdallah, said it would not be deterred from pursuing Netanyahu, telling Israel’s Channel 13 that “political considerations and threats will not affect the decision-making, the judges are independent and will only decide according to the evidence and the law.” He also said it was highly unlikely the judges would quash the warrants.

Politics at odds with international obligations

The evidence of the last few months is that political expediency sometimes trumps international obligations. When Mongolia welcomed Putin, the country’s reality of living next door to Russia and China was paramount.

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller acknowledged that reality in September. “We understand the position that Mongolia is in, sandwiched between two much larger neighbors, but we do think it’s important that they continue to support the rule of law around the world.”

The US view on the Israel case was rather different, with the National Security Council denouncing “the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision.”

The contradictory responses to ICC warrants this year call into question decades of progress in prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity, beginning with the Nuremburg trials in post-war Germany.

The road has often been bumpy. South Africa, an ICC member, ignored a warrant for the arrest of then-Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir in 2015 when he visited.

But Putin has been careful not to travel to any other ICC member state and skipped last year’s BRICS summit in South Africa, avoiding a flight path over many member states.

As for the ICC, it may now find itself a target. This year the US House of Representatives passed a bill to sanction the court, threatening financial sanctions and visa restrictions against individuals and judges associated with the ICC. The Senate is yet to take up the bill, but incoming Senate majority leader John Thune has warned that the Republican majority will make passing the bill a priority in the next Congress if the ICC doesn’t reverse its decision to pursue Israeli leaders.

In his first term, former President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on ICC prosecutors for their investigations of Israeli leaders and alleged American war crimes in Afghanistan.

Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser pick for his second term, said of the Netanyahu warrant that “the ICC has no credibility… You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC & UN come January.” Republican Senator Tom Cotton called it a “kangaroo court.”

It’s still true that for anyone subject to an arrest warrant by the ICC, the world gets smaller and the uncertainty of travel greater. But this year has shown that if you have friends in the right places, there will still be a red carpet somewhere.

A night of political upheaval in South Korea has upended stability in a key democratic US ally – sending shock waves through the region and Washington at a moment of acute global tension.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Tuesday night in a surprise decree that was reversed hours later following overwhelming opposition across the political spectrum for what was widely seen as a breach of the country’s vibrant democracy.

The move, which Yoon claimed was necessary to “save the country against anti-state forces” trying to destroy the “constitutional order of liberal democracy,” was met by protests in Seoul and mounting calls for the president’s resignation.

The stunning development appeared to catch Washington off guard. That’s an unnerving reality for the United States military, which has nearly 30,000 troops and its largest overseas base in South Korea, serving as a check against a belligerent North Korea and counterweight to an aggressive China in a strategically critical region.

The turmoil has the potential for significant ramifications at a moment of deepening geopolitical fault lines in Asia, where both North Korea and China are strengthening their alignment with Russia as it wages war on Ukraine.

Leaders in Pyongyang, Beijing and Moscow are likely watching the developments in Seoul with an eye to its potential to undermine a key bastion of US power in the region – and all eyes are now on North Korea, which may be keen to use the political chaos to its advantage.

‘Major ramifications’

The US-South Korea alliance has long been seen by both countries as a cornerstone of peace in the region, where North Korea continues to threaten South Korea and the US with its illegal weapons program.

That threat has only become more acute as North Korea has ramped up its partnership with Russia, sending ammunition, missiles, and soldiers, intelligence officials say, to aid Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden has worked assiduously during his time in office to bolster the US partnership with South Korea, meeting Yoon multiple times, referring to the South Korean leader as a “great friend,” and earlier this year passing his “Summit for Democracy” to Yoon to host in South Korea.

Biden’s efforts also included a landmark 2023 summit at Camp David with Japan and South Korea, where the US president navigated around historic mistrust between the two US allies to broker enhanced trilateral coordination.

A US National Security Council spokesperson expressed “relief” after Yoon reversed course on what the spokesperson described as his “concerning declaration,” adding that “democracy is at the foundation” of the US-South Korea alliance.

Despite US assurances that the alliance remains “ironclad,” the surprise move by Yoon could cast a level of doubt on the partnership and weaken the burgeoning Japan-South Korea partnership, observers say.

It also adds another level of uncertainty on the eve of the return to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has previously expressed skepticism about the financial arrangement between the US and South Korea on hosting US troops.

“Yoon’s actions most likely will raise questions about South Korea’s reliability and predictability as an ally and a partner in the eyes of the United States and Japan,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

“This is serious in light of the fact that there is now a stronger-than ever nuclear component in the (US-South Korea) alliance,” she added, pointing to a 2023 mechanism upgrading cooperation on nuclear deterrence between the US and South Korea, which does not have its own nuclear weapons but relies on the US arsenal.

Troubled neighborhood

The political turmoil also raises a potential opening for Kim Jong Un to capitalize on the chaos.

The North Korean leader is known to choose opportune political moments for major weapons tests – for example firing a new intercontinental ballistic missile days before the US presidential election last month.

“We know that North Korea likes to lampoon South Korea’s democratic system whenever there is tumult in Seoul,” said Edward Howell, a lecturer in politics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who focuses on the Korean Peninsula.

“We should not be surprised if Pyongyang exploits the domestic crisis in South Korea to its advantage, either rhetorically or otherwise,” he said.

The developments – and the potential, now, for a change of leadership in South Korea – are also likely being closely watched by Beijing and Moscow, who both deeply oppose US military presence in Asia.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his officials in particular have watched with ire as the US has strengthened its partnerships with allies in the region – in the face of concerns in Washington about a growing threat from Beijing and its deepening security coordination with Moscow.

And Yoon, who’s taken a harder line on North Korea than many of his predecessors, has been a willingly staunch partner of the US.

The Yoon government has also suggested that deployment of North Korean troops into Ukraine could cause it to reassess the level of military support it gives to the war-torn country, to which it does not directly supply lethal arms.

All that raises the international stakes for the current political moment, whatever its outcome for Yoon, according to Howell.

“At a time when South Korea’s interests in the Ukraine war have gained prominence, given North Korea’s now full-fledged involvement, Seoul’s cooperation with allies cannot be hampered by domestic division,” he said.

French lawmakers will vote Wednesday on a no-confidence motion that is widely expected to oust the government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, as the country grapples with a deepening political crisis and massive budget deficit.

The move comes after Barnier attempted on Monday to ram through part of his government’s budget for 2025, which included measures to fill the large hole in France’s public finances and bring the deficit back in line with European Union rules by the end of the decade.

His financing bill includes €60 billion ($63 billion) worth of tax hikes and spending cuts aimed at bringing the deficit down to 5% next year, according to the government’s calculations. Some of the measures are hugely unpopular with opposition parties, such as delaying matching pension increases to inflation.

Barnier, who has only been in power since September as the leader of a minority government backed by centrists and conservatives, attempted to pass the budget using a controversial constitutional mechanism that bypassed a vote in the legislature.

However, that maneuver in turn allowed lawmakers the opportunity to put forward no-confidence motions against him – and lawmakers on the left, who have repeatedly vowed to bring down his government, did just that.

The far-right National Rally party is now set to join the vote to topple the government after it failed to get finance bill concessions from Barnier.

This no-confidence vote is the just the latest jolt on a political rollercoaster in France, where no single party has wielded a majority in parliament since snap elections in July.

If the measure passes, it will throw the country into political chaos. No government has been ousted in a no-confidence vote since 1962 and Barnier would become France’s shortest-serving prime minister in history. His cabinet would have to serve in a caretaker capacity until French President Emmanuel Macron names new leadership.

But it’s unclear how any future prime minister will find unified support in a divided political landscape and avoid being similarly toppled. The parliament is deeply divided into three blocs: the centrists of Macron’s party, the far-right of Marine Le Pen’s party and a left-wing coalition.

This gridlock has made the government’s budget problems much harder to solve.

On Monday, worries about the impact of the political maelstrom on France’s public finances briefly pushed the government’s borrowing costs above those of Greece.

France’s government debt is approaching 111% of gross domestic product (GDP) – a level unmatched since World War II, according to the S&P Global Ratings credit rating agency – partly as the state spent big to cushion the economy from the pandemic and the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The credit rating agency expects France’s budget deficit to reach 6.2% of GDP by the end of the year. That’s more than double the 3% limit imposed by EU rules and one of the largest budget shortfalls among countries that use the euro.

“France remains a balanced, open, wealthy and diversified economy, with a deep domestic pool of private savings,” S&P Global Ratings said in a Friday statement. But it added that the country’s credit rating could be lowered if the government was “unable to reduce its large budget deficits” or if economic growth undershot the agency’s expectations over a sustained period.

Iranian authorities have allowed Narges Mohammadi, the country’s most prominent human rights activist and 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, to leave prison for 21 days to recover from surgery for suspected cancer, a decision her family has criticized as “too little, too late.”

An Iranian prosecutor on Tuesday suspended Mohammadi’s prison term for three weeks – instead of the three months requested by her family and lawyers – to allow her to recover from an operation she had in November to remove part of a bone in her lower right leg, where doctors had discovered a lesion suspected of being cancerous.

“After over a decade of imprisonment, Narges required specialized medical care in a safe, sanitary environment – a basic human right,” the foundation said. “As doctors have emphasized, a minimum of three months’ recovery is crucial for her healing.”

The Narges Foundation, which is run by her family, criticized the ruling as giving her insufficient time to recover. It had previously requested she be released for at least three months.

Mohammadi has spent most of the past two decades as an inmate of Tehran’s Evin prison – notorious for housing critics of the Iranian regime.

She is serving multiple sentences totaling more than 30 years, having been accused of acting against national security and spreading propaganda against the state.

Supporters say she’s a political prisoner who was detained for trying to advance women’s rights and democracy in the country.

In 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”

In November, her family accused the Iranian regime of trying to bring about her “slow death” by depriving her of the surgery needed to confirm her cancer diagnosis.

Her family and lawyer had warned that any delay in treating her could prove fatal and had called for her to be granted “medical furlough” to cover both the suspected cancer treatment and a range of other health conditions she is grappling with.

According to her lawyer, a recent MRI revealed the progression of arthritis and disc disease while doctors have also called for a further angiography on one of her heart arteries after she suffered a heart attack in 2021.

However, her foundation noted that Tuesday’s ruling was a suspension of her sentence, rather than a furlough.

“Unlike a ‘medical furlough,’ which would have allowed the recovery period to count toward her prison term, this suspension means that upon her return, she will be required to serve an additional 30 days,” the foundation said.

“Weeks of enduring excruciating pain in prison, despite tireless advocacy from fellow inmates, human rights organizations, and international figures, highlights the persistent disregard for Narges Mohammadi’s basic human rights and the inhumane treatment she endures,” the foundation added.

While in prison, Mohammadi has continued to campaign for human rights causes, lobbying for the rights of Iranian women and calling for a peaceful resolution to the war in Gaza.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is among the high-profile figures to have recently called for her release.