Putin gets a rope

South Africa’s governing African National Congress will aim to repeal the country’s International Criminal Court (ICC) membership…

South Africa’s governing African National Congress will aim to repeal the country’s International Criminal Court (ICC) membership, President Cyril Ramaphosa said. The party’s decision came after the ICC issued an arrest warrant on 17 March against Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. Only two days earlier, South Africa’s parliament announced that it would abandon a seven-year-long legislative process to pull South Africa out of the ICC’s Rome Statute. The decision has now been reversed.

Theorising international politics begins first by understanding the idealist and realist concepts that explain state behaviour. Usually, when a barely effective institution like the International Criminal Court (ICC) — an idealist creation like its parent body, the United Nations — makes a statement, it is routinely ignored. It has not stopped the ICC from making those statements, especially around issuing arrest warrants and, in return, getting the stick. When the ICC tried to prosecute American soldiers involved in alleged war crimes during the occupation of Afghanistan, the Trump Administration reacted angrily. The State Department rolled out several sanctions on the ICC, some of which included a visa ban on the chief prosecutor. The world’s major powers’ refusal to be part of the ICC’s Rome Statute and the US government’s reaction to an indictment of its soldiers speak to the side of international politics — realism — which is ugly to institutionalist observers. That is to say that the ICC’s arrest warrant for Mr Putin would have been ignored, and the US President — Joe Biden — set off a chain of reaction that had given life to the wet dream of African states when he stopped short of endorsing it. In South Africa’s case, leaving looks political on paper and signals the growing strength of the relationship between Russia and South Africa amid the attention that the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) bloc has garnered in recent weeks. However, it goes beyond that. A South African exit will trigger the exit of several other African states, who have collectively suspected the organisation of bias against the continent. Whatever side of the debate one falls on, it is clear that the ICC is the last hope of Africans in getting justice for crimes committed against them by their strong men and warlords. For all of its perceived bias, which international politics have largely fueled, the ICC remains a significant deterrent for African leaders, although its overall effectiveness remains debatable.