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Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

white house — The Biden administration denounced an International Criminal Court announcement this week that it is pursuing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders over alleged war crimes during Israel's military campaign in Gaza and the militant group's October 7 attack on Israel.   "We made our position clear on the ICC," President Joe Biden said Thursday. "We don't recognize their jurisdiction, the way it's been exercised, and it's that simple. We don't think there's an equivalence between what Israel did and what Hamas did."  International law experts say that the relationship between the U.S. and ICC has never been simple.  The ICC was established in 1998 by the Rome Statute and tasked with prosecuting individuals responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It was signed by the U.S. in December 2000, by U.S. lead negotiator David Scheffer.  The U.S., fearing that Americans would be vulnerable to prosecution abroad, never ratified the treaty.  More than 120 countries have ratified it, making them member states.  The ICC has jurisdiction over atrocity crimes committed by citizens of member states, or committed in member states, or in nonmember states that grant it jurisdiction. It also has jurisdiction over crimes committed in nonmember states that are referred to it by the U.N. Security Council.  The U.S. maintains that the ICC has no jurisdiction over citizens of non-ICC states. Israel is not an ICC member; therefore, the Biden administration said, the court has no right to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.  Stephen Rademaker, former chief counsel of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and assistant secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, agrees. "The fundamental principle undergirding all treaty-based international law is the principle of consent," he told VOA.   Under the U.S. argument, which Scheffer calls the "immunity interpretation," the same standards should apply to all non-ICC states.   However, various U.S. administrations have supported some ICC investigations.  The George W. Bush administration supported the ICC's 2002 investigations into allegations of atrocities committed in the Darfur region of Sudan. The Obama administration supported the ICC's case in Libya in 2011, which accused the government of Moammar Gadhafi of war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Sudan and Libya were non-ICC states, but under the Rome Statute, the U.N. Security Council had the authority to refer those cases to the ICC for investigation, Rademaker said. The ICC began its investigations of Russian officials for alleged atrocities in Ukraine in 2023, and of Israeli officials and Hamas leaders this month. Russia and Israel are non-ICC states, and neither investigation was authorized by the U.N. Security Council, Rademaker said. "So the U.N. Charter cannot be cited as a basis of consent by them to action by the ICC," he said. However, while it rejected the ICC's case against Israeli officials, the Biden administration supported the ICC's investigations of Russian suspects. Biden has used the word "genocide" to describe Russian atrocities in Ukraine and has described Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal who should be put on trial.  When asked to explain the distinction, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said that Putin's war aim was "to kill innocent Ukrainian people."   "He's deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure with the aim of killing innocent civilians, and it's just baked into his operational strategy," Kirby told reporters Monday. "As we have said before, that is not what the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is doing."  Hypocrisy alleged Critics say this difference in the Biden administration's posture amounts to hypocrisy.   "There is an obvious inconsistency," said Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University who writes on international law and the ethics of armed combat.  "It is hard to get around," he told VOA. "And it's easier to see when you contrast it with European countries which are allies of Israel but also parties to the ICC statute," he said, referring to Germany, which said it would execute the arrest warrant on German soil despite disagreeing with the decision.  While the contradiction is apparent under the Biden administration, selective U.S. engagement with the ICC began decades ago.  In 2002, George W. Bush signed into law the American Servicemembers' Protection Act, which authorizes the U.S. president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court."   The Obama administration rejected the ICC's preliminary examinations of the war in Afghanistan, including into alleged atrocity crimes committed by the Taliban, Islamic State group and U.S. coalition forces. It also opposed the court as it began pursuing war crimes charges against Israeli officials.  While the Bush and Obama administrations would apply a case-by-case approach to the ICC, under the Trump administration, U.S. "hostility hit its apex," said Kip Hale, an attorney specializing in atrocity crimes accountability. He said ICC investigations into Afghanistan and “Israel-Palestine” prompted the Trump administration to level sanctions against then-ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and one of her senior staff and to threaten other ICC staff and their families with visa bans and other punitive actions.  In the case of investigating Russian atrocities in Ukraine, the Biden administration changed provisions under the American Servicemembers' Protection Act and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2001 to allow for information sharing, funding and other types of support for the ICC, Hale told VOA.   "Unfortunately, the criteria is who are your allies and who are your rivals," he said, adding that geopolitical expediency often dictates the behavior of all states, not just the U.S.  ICC judges are now reviewing evidence presented by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, who made the decision to pursue arrest warrants with the advice of a panel of international legal experts that included prominent human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.  "We unanimously conclude that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including hostage-taking, murder and crimes of sexual violence," Clooney said in a statement.  "We unanimously conclude that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and extermination."  Netanyahu called the ICC's move against him and his defense minister absurd and said that he rejected "with disgust" the comparison between Israel and Hamas.  ICJ decision on Rafah  On Friday, the United Nations' top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, as part of proceedings against Israel brought by South Africa in December.   Israel doesn't accept the ICJ's jurisdiction and is unlikely to comply with the order. It maintains that its military campaign is a "defensive and just war" to eliminate Hamas and to secure the release of hostages and that it is "consistent with its moral values and in compliance with international law."  The ICJ was established by the U.N. Charter to settle disputes between states and advise the U.N. on legal matters. It does not have jurisdiction to try individuals.  While the ICJ's legal jurisdiction is separate from that of the ICC, Friday's ICJ decision can impact the ICC's proceedings, said Oona Hathaway, professor of international law at Yale Law School and member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State.  "ICJ can't enforce its orders, that's true. But it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be consequences," Hathaway told VOA. "If we see Israel refuse to abide by the decision of the International Court of Justice, you could very well see future charges in the International Criminal Court criminal charges," she said.   This could include the ICC prosecutor expanding his request for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders to include charges of genocide, she said.  Hathaway added that other consequences might include states withdrawing their military, financial and diplomatic support for Israel's war effort, which could further complicate the Biden administration's effort to continue backing its ally. Margaret Besheer and Natasha Mozgovaya contributed to this report.

International pressure on Israel escalated significantly this week. The top United Nations court on Friday ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The decision followed an announcement by Ireland, Spain, and Norway acknowledging Palestinian statehood. And on Monday, the International Criminal court’s chief prosecutor said he has asked ICC judges to approve arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three top Hamas leaders. Also, the Israeli army said three more hostages killed on October 7 were recovered from Gaza.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Carentan-les-Marais, France — Agnes Scelle grew up listening to her parents’ stories about life in occupied France, living near the Normandy town of Carentan-les-Marais. She heard of the knife pushed up against her father’s throat for trying to block a strategic river, of how German soldiers held her mother at gunpoint. “They were very afraid,” said Scelle, a former postal worker and village mayor, who still lives in her family’s ancestral home. “Even when the American soldiers had landed, they didn’t know what was going on because there were bombings.” As Normandy prepares for the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings on June 6, locals like Scelle are focusing on another war, as Russia gains ground in Ukraine. “The war is at Europe’s doorstep, so of course we’re afraid,” Scelle said. “We need to stick together, the Americans and the European Union, in case we see another conflict on our soil.” That message is expected to resonate next month, as onetime D-Day allies gather to mark the 80th anniversary of landings on Omaha Beach, roughly 30 km from Carentan-les-Marais. But the celebrations come as some Europeans worry that decades-old transatlantic ties may unravel, along with a U.S. commitment to Kyiv. The war in Ukraine is shaping this latest D-Day commemoration in other ways. Host France has invited Russia to the official ceremonies, but not Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even including Moscow has reportedly sparked tensions on the part of other WWII allies. “I can’t say what the solution is for this commemoration,” said Denis Peschanski, a World War II historian at the Sorbonne University in Paris. “What’s certain is we refuse to deny the fundamental contribution of the Soviet army in the liberation. We would never have had a successful landing in Normandy if there hadn’t been 180 German divisions that were blocked on the eastern front’’ by Soviet soldiers. Like other towns across Normandy, Carentan-les-Marais — known to locals as Carentan — has a full schedule of D-Day events running before and well after official ceremonies. Among them: a parachute drop in period clothes, a parade of World War II military vehicles, and an opportunity to meet Ukrainian war veterans and view a phalanx of donated ambulances bound for Ukraine’s battlefields. There’s also the wedding of 100-year-old U.S. World War II veteran Harold Terens to 94-year-old Jeanne Swerlin. Carentan’s mayor, Jean-Pierre Lhonneur, will officiate at the ceremony. "If you come here for the 80th anniversary, you’ll see we almost live in an American state,” said Carentan’s deputy mayor, Sebastien Lesne. “There will be many American flags flying from windows here to celebrate the peace we got back — and especially to say thank you to the veterans who are coming back this year, and who return every year.” Price of freedom A strategic crossroad, cut through by highways, waterways and a railway, Carentan saw a pitched six-day battle before American forces defeated the town’s German occupiers on June 12, 1944. Scelle still remembers her parents’ accounts of German occupation. Troops lived in her home in the village of Baupte, a few kilometers from Carentan. “It was a regular army,” as opposed to Nazi troops, she said. “If you were nice to them, things went well.” But when her father threw stones into the village river to try to block German passage, the soldiers threatened him with a knife. After the D-Day landings, they demanded of her mother at gunpoint that she disclose the location of arriving U.S. soldiers. Her family fled their home under falling bombs and found it ransacked when they finally returned. Roughly 20,000 French civilians died during the nearly three-month Battle of Normandy — along with about 73,000 Allied forces and up to 9,000 or so Germans. Overall, Normandy lost many more of its citizens during its liberation than during the entire German occupation. “My village didn’t have a lot of deaths, but people wouldn’t have been bitter anyway,” Scelle said. “For them, it was the price to pay for freedom.” Today, Scelle is helping out other war survivors. Since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, dozens of Ukrainian refugees have arrived in Carentan and surrounding villages. Many have since returned to their homeland. But Ukrainian student Kateryna Vorontsova, 19, and her family remain and count among those Scelle has helped to settle in and learn French. “I would like to stay in France,” said Vorontsova, although she wants to eventually return to her homeland in peace. “I like the weather, the landscape, the culture.” Of D-Day, she added, “it’s important to remember the landings. They’re our common history.” Ukraine ties Carentan has other ties to Ukraine. Donated ambulances line a field next to the D-Day Experience Museum, just outside Carentan. Some are funded by U.S. donors, others by European entities like the government of Madrid. Just after the D-Day anniversary, volunteers will drive them more than 2,000 km to Ukraine. “According to doctors I’ve talked to in Ukraine, every ambulance saves an average of 250 lives a month,” said Brock Bierman, president of Ukraine Focus, a nongovernmental group based in Washington and Ukraine, which is spearheading the effort. He is in Carentan organizing the convoy’s departure. “Our volunteer drivers have delivered them literally to the front lines … in Bakhmut and Kherson, in Odesa and Mykolaiv,” he added, naming towns in Ukraine. “There’s a lot of work to get this done, and we couldn’t do it without an alliance of people from all over Europe and the United States.” A former senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, Bierman strongly backs U.S. aid for Ukraine, including the $60 billion finally passed by Congress in April. Uncertainty about whether those funds would be approved lingers and is among issues feeding doubts in Europe about long-term U.S. commitment to Ukraine and — if Donald Trump returns to office — to the NATO transatlantic alliance. Bierman believes the costs will be high if Washington does not stand by Kyiv. “If we fail to support Ukraine’s independence, what we could be looking at is a longer-term conflict in the next decade — which could involve boots on the ground and possible American lives lost,” he said. At Carentan’s town hall, Deputy Mayor Lesne believes the Normandy landings offer lessons for today. “I think the most important message is in two words: to remember,” he said. “Not to forget what happened, so it won’t be repeated. Millions of people died in the Second World War — we can’t have that happen again.”

Some of the last surviving World War Two veterans gather in Normandy, France, next month to mark the 1944 allied landings that began the country’s liberation from Nazi German control. But another war on Europe’s doorstep — in Ukraine — casts a dark shadow on this 80th anniversary of D-Day. Lisa Bryant reports from the Normandy town of Carentan-les-Marais.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

washington — A court in the French capital on Friday ordered life sentences for three senior Syrian government officials in a landmark case.  After a four-day trial, the Paris Criminal Court said three Syrian officials had been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the war-torn country.  The case against Ali Mamlouk, former director of Syria’s National Security Bureau; Jamil Hassan, former head of the air force intelligence directorate; and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, former head of the air force intelligence’s branch in Damascus, was based on their role in the deaths of two French nationals of Syrian origin.  The two Frenchmen, Mazzen Dabbagh and his son, Patrick, were arrested in Damascus in 2013. The two were declared dead in 2018. The family was formally notified that Patrick had died in 2014 and that Mazzen had died in 2017.  The three Syrian officials were tried in absentia. This was the first time a trial of Syrian government officials had been held in France. The court’s ruling on Friday also upheld international arrest warrants against the Syrian officials that were issued in 2018.  Anwar al-Bunni, a Germany-based Syrian human rights lawyer, said Friday’s ruling was “historic,” and he noted it would have significant political implications for the Syrian government.     “This ruling will prevent any future efforts to normalize with the Syrian regime, especially since one of the officials prosecuted is Ali Mamlouk, who currently serves as a presidential adviser,” he told VOA. Ninar Khalifa, a researcher at Syrians for Truth and Justice, a France-based advocacy group, said the defendants could appeal the court’s decision only if they attended in person.     “But the fact that the verdict included crimes against humanity shows that the entire Syrian regime has been involved in persecuting people in Syria,” she told VOA. “This is not only about three officials. It’s against the military hierarchy of the Syrian regime from top to bottom.”    The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been accused of committing atrocities against civilians since the beginning of Syria’s civil war in 2011.     The conflict has killed more than half a million people and displaced more than half of the country’s prewar population of 22 million. The U.N. says more than 7 million Syrians have been internally displaced, while the others have fled to other countries. Mazen Darwish, director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, or SCM, testified on the final day of the hearings.    “This quest for justice to which we all aspire is in no way revenge. On the contrary, justice in general is there to prevent violence. We cannot destroy this terror and prevent this from happening again without justice putting an end to impunity,” Darwish said in his testimony on Friday, according to a post by SCM on social media platform X.    Darwish testified in the case as a witness since he himself had been arrested by the same Syrian intelligence agency that was responsible for the Dabbaghs’ arrests and during the same period of their imprisonments. He was released from a Damascus prison in 2015 after serving a three-year sentence for his political activism.    Other trials against former Syrian government officials have taken place elsewhere in Europe, notably in Germany. But in those cases, the prosecuted officials held lower ranks in the Syrian government and were present at the hearings.    This report originated in VOA’s Kurdish Service. Some information came from Agence France-Presse.

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United Nations — Humanitarians warned Friday that the situation in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, is growing more dire by the day, as the state’s only functioning hospital has about a week’s worth of supplies left and as casualties mount. “The fighting has reportedly forced thousands of people to flee since 10 May and caused hundreds of civilian casualties,” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters. May 10 is when clashes erupted inside El Fasher between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), who are positioned inside the city, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who attacked surrounding towns before they entered the state capital. According to Paris-based medical charity Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, at least 700 injured civilians arrived at that last operating hospital, known as South Hospital, in the past two weeks. Eighty-five of them have died. "People are arriving with abdominal injuries, chest wounds, brain trauma, and open fractures,” Claire Nicolet, MSF's head of emergency programs, said earlier this week in a statement. “Some have gunshot wounds, some have been wounded by bomb fragments, and others have been wounded by shelling.” She said the hospital urgently needs more surgeons and supplies. Humanitarians have been struggling for weeks to reach El Fasher, where at least 800,000 civilians are sheltering, many of them having been displaced from other parts of Darfur that have fallen to the RSF. “More than a dozen trucks carrying aid for more than 121,000 people have been trying to reach El Fasher for over a month, but the current security situation is making this all but impossible,” Dujarric said. He added that one World Food Program truck convoy carrying 1,200 metric tons of food and nutrition supplies for about 117,000 people was able to cross into North Darfur from Chad on Thursday, through the Tine crossing. The government of Sudan reopened that crossing in early March, after closing it citing concerns that it could be used to supply the RSF with arms and ammunition. Weapons accusations The Sudanese government has repeatedly accused the United Arab Emirates of sending arms to the RSF via airports in Chad. On Friday, the Security Council met at Sudan’s request to discuss the matter. The meeting was private; Sudan would have preferred it be public. Afterward, Sudan’s envoy said the UAE should be “censured and condemned” for its actions. “The UAE behaves like a rogue state,” Ambassador Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith Mohamed told reporters. “It must be punished for invading Sudan through local and foreign actors and proxies.” He said those proxies include mercenaries from Chad, southern Libya and parts of the Sahel. Mohammed said the RSF is using arms from the UAE to kill and rape civilians, displace people and destroy the country’s infrastructure. The UAE has repeatedly denied the accusations. “We are aware of the baseless allegations made against the UAE, which we have already addressed, including through letters to the Security Council, most recently of which was on 25 April,” UAE Ambassador Mohamed Abushahab told VOA in a written statement. “We see the efforts by the representative of Sudan as another attempt to distract the Security Council from the atrocities being committed by the warring parties, including attacks on civilians, hospitals and schools, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid,” he said. A report published in January by a panel of experts mandated by the Security Council to monitor sanctions implementation in Sudan said the SAF has used aerial bombing and heavy shelling in urban areas of Darfur, causing a large-scale humanitarian crisis. The panel also found that the RSF in July started using several types of heavy and sophisticated weapons that it did not have at the start of the war, in April 2023. The experts said this gave them a military advantage that let them quickly take over Nyala in South Darfur and El Geneina in West Darfur, while the RSF’s new anti-aircraft devices helped them to counter the SAF’s air force. The panel said that various flight-tracking experts had since June observed numerous cargo planes originating from Abu Dhabi International Airport arriving at Amdjarass International Airport in eastern Chad, with stops in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. They said information they gathered substantiated media reports alleging the aircraft carried weapons, ammunition and medical equipment for the RSF. The UAE told the panel that they were transporting humanitarian assistance for displaced Sudanese, not arms.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.