Despite the political alignment that allowed the recent arrest and transfer of former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court, arrest warrants have not been producing results in recent times.

The latest example was the extraordinary ‘debacle’ – as our guest Luigi Prosperi of Utrecht University put it – around Italy’s arrest and then transfer of Libyan warlord and smuggler Al Masri back to Libya. As of now, we have seen no response from Italy to the charge that it has failed to do its duty under the (ironically-named) founding document of the ICC, the Rome Statute.

Together with Luigi and our resident Italian speaker Margherita Capacci who produces our Patreon pod, we explored what exactly seemed to happen on the Italian side of things. And we wonder which countries, signed up to the ICC, would really arrest current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu or current Russian president Vladimir Putin, both facing charges at the ICC if they ever come to The Hague.

We promised in the pod to provide you a tonne of links. Luigi sent us the list below (of course he did, he’s a professor). We also suggest you can listen back to the earlier pods we did including the one with Nicole Samson head of the ICC’s investigative team into Libya and another with Sally Hayden who has written on the Libya migrant crisis.

Luigi’s recommended blog posts:

1. C. Meloni on JustSecurity: https://www.justsecurity.org/107175/italy-libya-icc-cooperation-elmasry-arrest/
2. L. Poltronieri Rossetti on EJIL: Talk! https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-failure-to-arrest-and-surrender-osama-elmasry-njeem-that-awful-mess-in-rome/
3. M. Crippa and M. Colorio on Opinio Juris https://opiniojuris.org/2025/01/31/as-rome-mutinies-justice-for-libya-fades/
4. G. Pecorella on International Law Blog https://internationallaw.blog/2025/02/22/a-lost-in-translation-in-the-obligations-to-cooperate-with-the-international-criminal-court-the-case-of-al-masri/
5. V. Bolici and A. Di Martino (in Italian) https://www.questionegiustizia.it/articolo/la-pagliuzza-e-la-trave-il-caso-almasri

And of course we have the ‘leisure’ recommendations of our guests. What Strange Paradise by Omar el-Akkad and the movie Sing Sing and Sally’s book My Fourth Time, We Drowned.