ICC: Instrument of neocolonialism or global justice?

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) may have accepted South Africa’s case against alleged Israeli genocide in Gaza, but that does not absolve these international judicial instruments, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), from being neocolonial repressive mechanisms of the West.

Targeting African leaders is still part of the ICC agenda. I don’t have to repeat what is in the public domain that Western countries act with impunity to commit untold atrocities in targeted countries throughout the world, while the ICC unashamedly continues to fold its arms.

The ICC bias towards the West was put so eloquently by former UK MP Robin Cook in 2002, when he said the creation of the ICC and the signing of the Rome Statute “will not affect the UK” because the international legal body was created “not to hold politicians in the UK or any other Western state to account”.

As of February, the ICC has indicted 52 people, 90% of whom are from the African continent. No wonder its regular attacks on the continent prompted the creation of an African Union committee to withdraw from the ICC.

Political analyst Prof Ntsikelelo Breakfast, director of the Centre for Security and Conflict Resolution at Nelson Mandela University, expressed disdain at the lack of representation of non-Western values at the ICC, which he says indicates how biased the body is.

ALSO READ: Gaza: SA’s bold move against Israel sparks global backlash

The scholar noted that human rights violations are often blamed on people who “do not adhere to Western values” and who can be labelled as not conforming to Western democratic values, while the court’s over-emphasis on the African continent is a consequence of the double standard policy to which the global South has been victimised over the years.

The researcher emphasised that the very idea of creating the ICC came from the desire of Western powers to “consolidate their hegemony” and “promote American ideas and values”.

A former assistant prosecutor at the ICC recently argued that, in most cases, there were serious irregularities in the collection of evidence and testimony in the trials of African political figures, to which everyone “turned a blind eye”.

According to Dan Kovalik, an American lawyer, human rights activist and author, the ICC is influenced by powerful Western countries and is prevented from prosecuting them for violating international law. He argues that, because of the ICC’s bias against African nations, it has become “an instrument of pressure on Africa”.

The ICC is largely a tool of European and American neocolonialists who wish to maintain and increase their pernicious influence over African countries and peoples.

ALSO READ: Pandor demands ICC action on Gaza civilians’ killings

Africa’s cries against injustice by the ICC are ignored. In 2013, then prime minister of Ethiopia Hailemariam Desalegn accused the ICC of “hunting Africans on the basis of their race”.

Sources at the Foundation to Battle Injustice agreed that the ICC’s accusations against Russia should be understood solely in the context of continuing the neocolonial interests of Western political elites – who have corrupted judicial institutions and turned them into their own servants.

The ICC has been a disappointment to a huge number of people who believed that the new body of international justice would approach the fulfilment of its mandate in an objective and neutral manner, according to Arnaud Develay, a French lawyer and international law expert who participated in the trial of Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq.

A legal expert argues that the ICC’s dependence on various political forces and financial elites in the West undermines the rule of law and international law as a concept.

Develay stressed that we are now living in an era of globalised conflicts that include hybrid warfare, part of which includes legal confrontation and attempts to use legal rules as leverage against governments, including fabricating facts and evidence.

ALSO READ: Ramaphosa’s move to refer Israel to ICC for war crimes the right one