In a landmark legislative vote that marks a sharp shift in Hungary’s international legal commitments, the country’s national parliament approved a bill on Wednesday to cancel the previous administration’s planned withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC), cementing Hungary’s continued membership in the world’s only permanent tribunal for prosecuting war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
The reversal comes eight months after former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government announced Hungary would exit the ICC, a move that came immediately on the heels of a state visit to Budapest by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The visit sparked global condemnation because the ICC had already issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over allegations of war crimes tied to Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, and Orbán’s government refused to execute the warrant, a requirement for all ICC member states. Orbán at the time defended his decision by claiming the ICC had devolved into a partisan “political court”, drawing sharp rebuke from the court and other global intergovernmental bodies. Hungary’s withdrawal had been scheduled to formally take effect on June 2 of this year.
The legislation reversing the exit was introduced just two days before the vote by current Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who took office after Orbán’s government lost recent parliamentary elections. In the text of the bill, Magyar’s administration emphasized that upholding global peace and defending universal human rights requires that perpetrators of the world’s most serious atrocities be held accountable before a legitimate international judicial body. “To this end, it is necessary to maintain Hungary’s participation in the Statute of the International Criminal Court,” the bill reads.
The final vote split largely along party lines: 133 legislators from Magyar’s ruling Tisza Party supported the bill, while 37 lawmakers voted against the measure and five abstained from the vote. The ICC’s governing body, the Assembly of States Parties, had publicly signaled its support for the reversal ahead of the vote, releasing a pre-ballot statement Monday that offered early congratulations to the new Hungarian government for the decision to stay in the court. The group reiterated that Hungary’s continued membership strengthens the global framework for accountability for mass atrocities.
Notably, this isn’t the first time the ICC has clashed with Hungary over the Netanyahu visit: last year, the court’s judges officially ruled that Hungary had violated its binding legal obligations by failing to detain the Israeli prime minister during his trip. In a July 2024 ruling, a judicial panel found that “failure to arrest suspects severely undermines the court’s ability to carry out its mandate.”
Hungary has deep historical ties to the court: it was one of the founding members of the ICC, and Orbán himself personally signed the court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, back in 1999 when he first held the office of prime minister. If the withdrawal had moved forward, Hungary would have become only the third sovereign state to formally leave the ICC, following the exits of Burundi and the Philippines, and would have been the sole member of the 27-nation European Union not party to the court’s founding treaty. Reporting for this article was contributed by Quell from The Hague, Netherlands.