Putting an end to 'lawfare'

Last January, Baroness Patricia Scotland, attorney general of the United Kingdom, assured a Hebrew University audience that she would stop her country’s police from arresting visiting Israeli dignitaries. The fact that she deemed it necessary to provide that assurance illustrates the latest manifestation of “lawfare.”

Throughout the West — i.e., Western Europe and the United States — Israel’s opponents have gone to court to obtain arrest warrants aimed at visiting Israeli political and military officials in a campaign to delegitimize the state. The attempts to secure arrest warrants are usually based on the legal doctrine known as “universal jurisdiction.” Conventional notions of jurisdiction rest on a connection between the forum state and the alleged criminal activity. The crime may have occurred within the state (the territorial principle), it may involve subjects of the state (the nationality principle) or it may generate effects within the state (the effects principle). Universal jurisdiction goes farther. It confers jurisdiction over criminal conduct so grave that it affects the fundamental interests of the international community as a whole, regardless of the forum state’s connection to the acts.