The ICC as a device to hold Africans at ransom

After all the unchecked injustice on Africans that has been happening in the last couple of months in South Africa, I found it pathetic that one of their judges could get all excited to implement orders of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC order was to not let Sudanese President Omal El Bashir, who was in that country to attend the AU Summit, leave South Africa, and instead arrest him and send him to The Hague-based court to answer charges against him. The US had the decency, this time, of keeping quiet, after a spate of violence, against a similar people, went unchecked. And for many other reasons... My quarrel with the ICC is because it is a politicized body created by the west to blackmail and hold to ransom the rest. Tony Abbot of Australia conspired with human traffickers to turn asylum seekers back to Indonesia. Human trafficking is a gross human rights violation in international law. Since we cannot imagine Australian courts to even investigate, let alone prosecute, the ICC would, in principle, have ground for ceasing the case and, if verified, issue an arrest warrant against the sitting Australian Prime Minister; sorry, that was just a dream… Innocent civilians are routinely killed in Gaza, in Lebanon; en mass - there is the shocking video of the killing of the two children playing at the beach, which was strongly highlighted by the UN Human Rights Commissioner with nothing happening. The US and UK killed innocents in Afghanistan and in Iraq; they invaded and bombed women and children on fake allegations that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. The only person to have been prosecuted and jailed for those actions was Bradley Manning, the US military-man who revealed to Wikileaks some shocking images of the killing of innocent Iraqis attending a wedding or some social function, and a few minutes later, the killing of the people in the ambulance that came to rescue them. Today, in the name of the war on terror, the US uses drones to bomb in Pakistan, daily. I used to have a professor, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, who presented every year to the UN’s Human Rights Council, a detailed report of those acts and the heavy collateral damage they caused. When I read one of those reports, I cried; but when an American Senator read them, he called my prof a jerk… Now most of these acts constitute, without a doubt, Crimes of War and Crimes against Humanity. But they will never be checked because their perpetrators: the US and UK are permanent members of the UN Security Council which has the mandate to veto (block) ICC indictments. But the strongest arguments really against the ICC are that three of the five UN Security Council members who have the mandate to move (ask) the prosecutor to investigate, or block her indictments, do not believe in the court and have never signed the Rome Statutes. In fact one of them has gone as far as passing an Act that allows its army to use ‘all means necessary’ to prevent any of their citizens or allies to be prosecuted by the ICC (by ally read countries in the NATO): You guessed right, it is the US, and the infamous Act is: ‘American Service-Member Protection Act’. We human rights lawyers call that Act – ‘The Invasion of The Hague Act.’ Because ‘all means necessary’ basically means that the US can attack, bomb or threaten the Netherlands; where the seat of the ICC is based, to block such prosecution. Now, two wrongs don’t make a right. Africans have had their fare share of sanguinary people and any court that would scare them off or prosecute them would be welcome. The fact that we have not managed to set up one on our continent is our own failure. But with time the ICC has been used to demean the African people; and the double standards described above can’t help but remind memories on slavery and colonialism. Oh, one last thing: the argument that Africans voluntarily adhered to the Rome Statutes - which set-up the court, is a vulgar fallacy. Africans have never voluntarily adhered to any of the international conventions. Granted, this one was drafted in a conference in Uganda, but the major conventions were drafted by people who were, at the exact same time practicing colonialism on Africans and apartheid in their respective countries. The ‘carrot-and-stick’ system is designed in a way that coerces Africans to enter into conventions, sometimes without even grasping their contents. Or mimicking European conventions for African bodies, so as to survive in the terribly skewed and unjust world we live in. Alas, Julian Assange had tried to somewhat ‘level the playing field’ by revealing the fundamentally evil side of the people behind the ICC. We all know where he is now… This is an abridged version of an article that was published recently on the writer’s blog. Gatete is human rights lawyer based in Kigali www.gateteviews.blogspot.com

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The ICC as a device to hold Africans at ransom