By Staff Reporter
The court that is considered the global court of “last resort” in criminal matters is the International Criminal Court (ICC).
It was founded in The Hague, the Netherlands, on July 1, 2002 as the culmination of the long-running quest for a court of international jurisdiction.
The international treaty known as “The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court” set up the governing framework for the ICC, after it was adopted at the Rome Conference on July 17, 1998. ICC is the world’s first and only permanent international criminal court.
According to its information page, the ICC is a court of law that “seeks to complement, not replace national Courts”.
Official records show that after two decades of operations, the Court has had 31 cases before it, issued 10 convictions, and made 4 acquittals.
Equality
The existence of the ICC has never been without controversies. Analysts and rights groups say the latest example of the ICC’s lopsided actions relates to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
The attacks by Israel against Palestinians have ''caused horrific destruction, and in some cases wiped out entire families,” the rights group, Amnesty International stressed.
The actions of Israel ''must be investigated as war crimes,'' the rights group added in a report on the latest escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Some including Palestinian Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Tamer Almassri, believe if the atrocities being committed by Israel were by an African country or leaders, the ICC would have quickly jumped into the matter.
"Unfortunately, the ICC does not take any action against the Israeli criminals because they are not Africans," Almassri told a press conference in Harare last week.
"If they were African, they would arrest them and call them to the court, but because they are not with the black skin, they are free to make a genocide they want," the envoy added.
Scapegoat
Another example, according to experts, is how South Africa came under Western pressure to act on an ICC arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin during BRICS summit the country hosted in August.
The arrest warrant relates to Russia-Ukraine war. President Putin decided not to attend the summit in person in South Africa.
According to the ICC’s current data, nine out of the ten “situations” it has investigated to date, have been in Africa, often involving high profile Africans.
The Court has convicted, acquitted, indicted, issued arrest warrants, or investigated more African leaders than of any other continent.
They include former presidents Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast, Omar Albashir of Sudan, Late Mua’ammar Gaddafi of Libya as well Uhuru Kenyatta, and President William Ruto both of Kenya. The Court has issued arrest warrants for at least two serving African heads of state.
While all these narrow focus on Africa was going on, the Court declined to investigate crimes allegedly committed in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine where some Western leaders or their allies are accused of involvement.
Pressure is now mounting on the ICC to investigate the ongoing attacks by Israel on Gaza, but it is unclear whether it is going to do so despite many international organisations and analysts saying they amount to ''war crimes.''
Some observers say the ICC scapegoats African leaders while skipping Western leaders accused of committing or abating ''war crimes'' particularly in foreign countries.
Critics fault ICC’s targeting of Africa as being “inappropriate” neocolonial cherry picking, and thus began to question its legitimacy on both moral and legal grounds.
However, according to ICC Forum website, the Court has invoked its own jurisdiction in only a few cases. “Other situations have all come to the Court through referrals from the [African] States concerned, and the Security Council.”
Crimes in focus
Of the seven country offices operated by the ICC today, six are in African countries: Mali, Ivory Coast, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic. Only the one in Georgia, is outside the African continent.
Many observers see this as an apparent structural imbalance making Africa the first catchment of the ICC jurisdiction.
The genesis of the creation of permanent International Criminal Court was the realisation of the successes of two ad hoc tribunals, vis-à-vis the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The ICTR was the international court established pursuant to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 955 of November 8, 1994, to prosecute crimes committed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which succeeded in convicting over 50 individuals.
Therefore, when the ICC was established in The Hague, its statutes were set out to cover jurisdictions over “genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and – as of an amendment in 2010 – the crime of aggression”.
Africa’s solution
However, in as much as the ICC came to build on the legacies of successful case trials in Africa and the Balkans, nowhere in its statutes it is stated that the court should specifically target Africa or the Balkans, nor the developing world.
Due to this situation, there have been debates on whether African countries should quit the court.
The continent forms the biggest bloc of ICC signatories. Out of the 123 States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 33 or 27 percent are African States. 13 additional African states are waiting to ratify the ICC statute, having signed the Rome Treaty.
So far, Burundi is the only African country that withdrew from the ICC, in October 2017. Only two other countries have left the ICC - Russia in 2016, and the Philippines in 2018.
Gambia and South Africa had earlier indicated their intentions to leave, but later decided to remain.
Critics say it is time for Africa to look through the counterintuitive window, and recognise that ICC is a neocolonial trap that exposes the insincerity of the Western world.
However, some proponents of the ICC say the court helps in making African citizens hold their leaders to account. But critics say the application of the court’s mechanism must be universal.
Some analysts believe Africa needs to leave the subterfuge of International Criminal Court and strengthen their own legal systems to handle cases that could otherwise warrant the intervention of the ICC.
