GOVERNMENT

Péter Kovács

Judge

Hungarian judge Péter Kovács was the lone dissenting voice on a three-person panel of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which ruled in February that the ICC’s territorial jurisdiction in the “Situation in Palestine, a State party to the ICC Rome Statute,” covered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, alleging that the areas had been “occupied” by Israel since 1967 — a notion that Jerusalem disputes. “I cannot accept and even less understand why a Chamber should accept as given, and quasi mandatory, a statement on the existence of ‘the territory of the State’ when…all the indications show that it is premature to speak of a full-fledged ‘State’ and of ‘the territory of the State’,” he wrote in his opinion. As a professor of public international law at the University of Budapest, Kovács is a recognized expert on various aspects of international humanitarian law, including the development and limits of international jurisprudence. (Photo: Courtesy ICC-CPI/Max Koot)