The Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court, for the first time in its history, has ordered the ICC Prosecutor to pursue an investigation she has decided to close. The Chamber ruled that the Prosecutor was wrong to close the preliminary investigation into war crimes charges against Israel for crimes allegedly committed in boarding the Mavi Marmara and other vessels during the flotilla incident of 2010.

The ruling of the Pre-Trial Chamber is remarkable.

It holds that the Prosecutor should have taken into account facts and actions that are outside the jurisdiction of the court in deciding whether to bring charges.

It holds that the Prosecutor should assume the truth of even the wildest accusations in deciding whether to bring charges; in other words, there should be an irrebuttable presumption of guilt in the preliminary investigation stage.

And most shockingly, it holds that crimes have sufficient gravity to interest the court, even if they have very few actual victims, as long as they are widely covered by the media, and are subject to a lot of political activity at the UN.

Needless to say, none of these holdings are accompanied by any citation to precedent. That’s because they are without any precedent.

And it’s a safe bet that last two of these “rules” will never be applied to any non-Jewish, non-Israeli defendant. That’s because the rules, if universally applied, would require the Prosecutor to investigate thousands of non-crimes every year, making the prosecution of real crime impossible. And it would make the Prosecutor throw away legal standards and make her choices based on the most political UN proceedings.

There is a strong dissent to the Pre-Trial Chamber’s ruling by Judge Péter Kovács that addresses the issues far more persuasively. First, Judge Kovács points out, it requires serious distortion of both the facts and the law to come to the conclusion that Israel committed any crimes at all. As Kovács noted, “The injuries sustained by the individuals on board the Mavi Marmara were apparently incidental to lawful action taken in conjunction with protection of the blockade.” Kovács observes, “a ship that is non-violent and not resisting may nonetheless be captured because of its attempting to breach a blockade. It is clear that not only was it the Mavi Marmara’s intention to breach the blockade, but this was its main purpose, as an act of protest. With this in mind, Israeli forces had a right to capture the vessel in protection of their blockade. … Faced with a potential breach of the blockade, the IDF acted out of necessity.”