The groundbreaking war crimes trial in The Hague of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo has rekindled a bitter row across Africa over the international justice system.
With Gbagbo the first ex-head of state to be hauled into the dock at the world’s only permanent war crimes court yesterday, some in Africa are lashing out at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for allegedly pursuing Africans alone.
The continent, they say, should have its own court.
Photo: EPA
“It leaves me a bit puzzled to see former African leaders dragged before the ICC,” said Babacar Ba, who heads a judicial forum in Senegal.
“It’s as if we Africans are incompetent to decide the law or lack the resources to judge our own people,” Ba said.
Instead of trying Gbagbo at the ICC, “we could have set up Extraordinary African Chambers as we did for Hissene Habre,” he said, referring to the special court set up in Dakar by the African Union (AU) to try the former Chadian leader.
Delayed for years, the first phase of the Habre trial for atrocities wrapped up last month, setting a historic precedent, as up until then, African leaders had been tried in international courts for such abuse.
The Habre trial has set a precedent in the struggle to end impunity as it sees a former African head of state forced to account for his actions in another African nation’s court under the principle of “universal competence.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon this month said the Habre trial, along with several cases before the ICC, showed “the surge in accountability mechanisms.”
“The world is witnessing a sea change in ending impunity for atrocious crimes,” Ban said in his New Year’s message.
At stake at the Habre trial that opened last year was Africa’s “capacity to judge its own children so others don’t do it in its stead,” Extraordinary African Chambers spokesman Marcel Mendy said.
However, Ba said it was key for African states to follow Senegal’s lead and adopt the principle of “universal competence” to enable them to hold such trials.
Set up in 2002 as the last resort to try war criminals and perpetrators of genocide never tried at home, the ICC has opened probes involving eight nations, all of them African: Kenya, Ivory Coast, Libya, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Uganda and Mali.
African leaders have accused it of acting as the judicial arm of foreign powers.
The creation of the ICC “was strongly backed by Africa,” which now considers it “no longer a tribunal for all,” Ethiopian Minister for Foreign Affairs Tedros Adhamon Ghebreyesus said, speaking on behalf of the AU in November last year.
ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of Gambia disagreed.
“All the cases we have, with the exception of Kenya, Sudan and Libya, were initiated on the request of African states,” she said in November.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.