Trump Discusses Hungary’s ICC Withdrawal with Orbán and Netanyahu in Three-Way Call

On 3 April 2025, Axios report­ed that Pres­i­dent Trump held a phone con­ver­sa­tion with Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu and Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán regard­ing Hun­gary’s deci­sion to with­draw from the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court. The arti­cle begins:

Pres­i­dent Trump held a phone call Thurs­day with Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu and Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán and dis­cussed Hun­gary’s deci­sion to with­draw from the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court (ICC), Netanyahu’s office said. Why it mat­ters: The ICC issued an arrest war­rant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes dur­ing the war in Gaza. His vis­it to Hun­gary on Thurs­day was the first time he trav­eled to a coun­try under the court’s juris­dic­tion — but Orbán announced ahead of his arrival that Hun­gary would be with­draw­ing from the ICC…

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Key Points:

• Orbán announced Hun­gary’s with­draw­al from the ICC ahead of Netanyahu’s vis­it to Budapest, pro­tect­ing the Israeli leader from poten­tial arrest on war crimes charges.
• Trump, a long­time crit­ic of the ICC who pre­vi­ous­ly sanc­tioned its pros­e­cu­tors, invit­ed Netanyahu to vis­it the White House in the com­ing weeks.
• Netanyahu thanked Orbán for stand­ing against “this cor­rupt orga­ni­za­tion” that he claims unfair­ly tar­gets Israel while ignor­ing “ter­ror­ist powers.”
• The ICC has also issued an arrest war­rant for Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin, sim­i­lar­ly lim­it­ing his inter­na­tion­al trav­el options in coun­tries rec­og­niz­ing the court.

Orbán and Hun­gary have fig­ured promi­nent­ly in a devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, a poten­tial means for Rus­sia to exert covert influ­ence in Europe and the US using Hun­gary as a plat­form. GIOR has pub­lished a report on this alliance titled “The Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Alliance: An Oppor­tu­ni­ty for Russ­ian Influ­ence?” The GIOR report details the role that Vik­tor Orbán and the Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment have been play­ing in the Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA).

The full report can be down­loaded here.

Dis­claimer: The GIOR uti­lizes AI to gen­er­ate sum­maries of news items, includ­ing the intro­duc­tion and the key points that fol­low. Any text fol­low­ing the key points is con­text added by GIOR edi­tors. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they are meant to rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als con­cerned but should not be under­stood as “real-world” photography.