The UK’s attorney general, Lord Richard Hermer, and director of public prosecutions (DPP) Stephen Parkinson have rejected an application for an arrest warrant for Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
The pro-Palestine campaign group Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA), which submitted the application earlier this week, said on Thursday it was now lodging a claim in the High Court for judicial review to challenge the decision.
FOA told Middle East Eye that it applied for judicial review on the grounds that the DPP did not make “sufficient inquiry to obtain all relevant information available”.
The group also said that the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) approach “was not correct for an urgent application for a suspect who was imminently within the jurisdiction”.
On Tuesday, FOA instructed a legal team to apply for the arrest warrant on charges of “aiding, abetting or procuring direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects”.
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MEE understands that FOA’s application referred to remarks the president made in October 2023, when he said that all Palestinians in Gaza were “unequivocally” responsible for the 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel.
The group said that some of Herzog’s remarks were “repeated by senior Israeli military command conducting a campaign of indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects in Gaza”.
On Wednesday, shortly before Herzog met UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the CPS’s counter terrorism division appointed a senior specialist prosecutor to “urgently” review FOA’s application.
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Ismail Patel, the chair of FOA, lamented the attorney general’s decision to reject the application and said the DPP had “failed” to obtain all the relevant information to proceed with the arrest warrant.
Parkinson, as the DPP and head of the CPS, reports to Hermer, the attorney general.
“It is crucial that all clear, reliable and credible evidence is considered when the DPP makes a decision,” Patel told MEE.
“We know there are significant dossiers of evidence the DPP has failed to consider in their refusal to consent to a warrant, and that is not appropriate.
“We will now appeal to the courts to bring potential war criminals to account,” he added.
Speaking at the Chatham House think tank late on Wednesday, Herzog told attendees that he both “argued” and had points of agreement with Starmer when they met at Downing Street.
News of Herzog’s visit to Britain has sparked widespread outrage since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court – and Herzog himself has backed Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
MEE reached out to the CPS for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
