The Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court Over the Killing of the Reporter of Al-Jazeera Shereen Abu Aqleh

This research dealt with the issue of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over the murder of the journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh in Jenin on Wednesday morning, May 11, 2022. In this regard, the research addressed the various and possible scenarios in the issue of criminal jurisdiction in both its formal and objective aspects in terms of overlap, parallelism and separation between national and international criminal jurisdiction as well as the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction on the case in question. All of this was derived from the research problem represented by the conflict of criminal jurisdiction in the case under investigation, especially in complex cases - including the case handled in this research - when the crime is committed on the territory of a state party and the accused holds the nationality of a non-party state and the victim is a third-country national, and also when another complexity is added when the crime scene is classified as an occupied territory. The research also addressed the substantive jurisdiction of the court in support of the applicability of the elements of a war crime given that the victim is a civilian, and the Israeli occupation has always violated many of the principles of the Rome Statute, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 protocols, particularly, the principle of distinction and the principle of proportionality. This is assuming the presence of a military target, which the research found to deny. The research aimed to put those scenarios before the jurists and practitioners in the domain of international criminal law for a more in depth understanding about the jurisdiction scenarios. The research concluded that there was a defect in the principle of “complementarity” in criminal jurisdiction, which the International Criminal Court adopts which, according to the researcher, impedes achieving justice in a speedy manner in such cases.