Presumably if they get invited to Europe it will be with assurance from the state that nothing happens to them. And traveling uninvited is probably a bad move anyway. So not much difference.

If you mean to imply that Europe is somehow going to shoot down their planes if they fly over that’s obviously absurd.

> If you mean to imply that Europe is somehow going to shoot down their planes if they fly over that’s obviously absurd.

Shoot down? No.

Force them down? There's precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

You will find that you'll get much better discussions if you do some introspection on how you might misinterpret someone when you think someone says something that you think is 'obviously absurd'. Why would they say something that is obviously absurd?

Maybe it is more revealing that you jump to the obviously absurd interpretation rather than the even more obvious, and not absurd one?

> Presumably if they get invited to Europe it will be with assurance from the state that nothing happens to them.

I believe ICC members are obligated to enforce its warrants, which is why Putin couldn't attend BRICS in South Africa last year. And this applies to almost all the western world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court

So no, it's not toothless.

"Invitations" for government officials are pretty much invitations in name only.

Many of the emails of Assad and his government have been leaked and show in great detail how various governments interact with each other. And how Assad ran his country by forwarding NYT articles...