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Hungary has said it will begin the process of withdrawing from the international criminal court, hours after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – the subject of an ICC arrest warrant – arrived in the country for an official visit.
“Hungary will withdraw from the ICC,” Gergely Gulyás, prime minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff, said. “The government will initiate the withdrawal procedure on Thursday in accordance with the constitutional and international legal framework.”
The announcement came shortly after Netanyahu, who has been under an international arrest warrant since November over allegations of war crimes in Gaza, was greeted at Budapest airport in the early hours of Thursday morning by Hungary’s defence minister.
Withdrawing from the court, to which all 27 EU members belong, would entail passing a bill through parliament, which is dominated by Orbàn’s Fidesz party, and would be expected to take up to a year.
Orbán invited his Israeli counterpart to visit the day after the Hague-based ICC, the world’s only permanent global tribunal for war crimes and genocide, issued the warrant, described by Israel as politically motivated and fuelled by antisemitism.
Netanhayu’s government has also alleged the court lost its legitimacy by issuing the warrants against a democratically elected leader of a country exercising the right of self-defence after the October 2023 attack by Hamas-led fighters on southern Israel.
In principle, Hungary – which signed the ICC’s founding document in 1999 and ratified it in 2001 – should be required to detain and extradite anyone subject to a warrant from the court, but Budapest has argued the law was never promulgated.
“It was never made part of Hungarian law,” Gulyás said late last year, meaning no ICC measure can be legally carried out within Hungary. Orbán in any case said he would not respect the ruling, calling it “brazen, cynical and completely unacceptable”.
Hungary’s illiberal prime minister told reporters in November that he would “guarantee” the ICC’s ruling would “have no effect in Hungary”, and has floated the prospect of pulling his country out of the court on several occasions since.
“It’s time for Hungary to review what we’re doing in an international organisation that is under US sanctions,” Orbàn said on in February when Donald Trump imposed sanctions on the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan.
Orbàn has been a strong supporter of Netanyahu for many years, embracing Israel’s rightwing prime minister as an ally who shares the same nationalist and sovereigntist views. Hungary has frequently blocked EU statements or sanctions against Israel.
The visit marks Netanyahu’s second trip abroad since ICC warrants were announced against him and his former defence chief, as well as for the Hamas leader Ibrahim al-Masri. In February, he travelled to the US, which like Israel is not a member of the ICC.
ICC judges said when they issued the warrant that there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and his former defence chief were criminally responsible for acts including murder, persecution and starvation as a weapon of war.
