Hungary will not arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he enters the region, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said Thursday.
ICC guarantee
The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday announced an arrest warrant for Putin on war crimes charges of illegally deporting Ukrainian children.
Also read: ICC issues arrest warrant for Putin over Ukraine
But the warrant is illegal in Hungary, according to government official Gergely Gulyas, even though the EU member is a member of the ICC.
“We can refer to Hungarian law and on that basis we cannot arrest the Russian president… because the ICC statute has not been promulgated in Hungary,” Gulyas said at a press conference in Budapest.
Hungary signed the Rome Statute of the ICC in 1999 and ratified it in 2001, during the first term of Orban, who has won four straight elections since 2010.
Gulyas said that the statute had not been formally incorporated into Hungarian law because “it would violate the constitution”.
ICC authority
He added that neither the United States nor Russia recognized the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Budapest declined to comment on the warrant, but Gulyas said the decision was “not the most fortunate”.
It was a move “in the direction of escalation rather than peace,” he said.
Orban – close to Putin before the war – has drawn fierce criticism from EU allies for refusing to send arms to Kyiv, opposing sanctions against Russia, and even calling for peace talks.
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