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.
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