Ashraf AboArafe
Russian Ambassador to Cairo Georgy Borisenko addressed the double standards of the International Criminal Court, addressing the story from the beginning. He said: The ICC was established under the Rome Statute, which entered into force in 2002, as a global justice institution aimed at prosecuting those who committed genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression. In order to grant it special status, the decision was made to transfer cases from the UN Security Council to this body for consideration.
In the hope of achieving the court’s stated goals, more than 120 countries have joined the Rome Statute, but there are countries that do not participate, such as Egypt, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Turkey.
Russia also revoked its signature and withdrew from the relevant international treaty in 2016, due to the ineffectiveness of this institution and its politicized nature, as well as numerous instances of abuse of power by the court’s leadership. Statistics clearly demonstrate this. Despite its annual budget of $170 million and a staff of 900, only about 40 individuals have been declared wanted over the past 20 years, and no more than 15 final convictions have been issued.
Moreover, there is a clear geographical bias in the activities of the International Criminal Court, which initially chose Africa as the primary target of its investigations, in the spirit of Western neocolonial thinking. Meanwhile, crimes committed by Western armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone unpunished. For this reason, in 2017, the African Union adopted a strategy for African states to withdraw from this body.
A clear example of the destructive role played by the ICC is its biased handling of the Darfur crisis, as in 2008, when it issued an arrest warrant for former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, a decision that hindered the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between North and South Sudan. At the time, the Arab League rejected charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Sudanese leader, and the Council of Foreign Ministers of the League’s member states criticized this dangerous precedent. This is just one example of how indicting leaders of warring countries or groups has become a serious obstacle to resolving conflicts in Africa. Instead of achieving justice, this judicial body has only brought new problems for Africans.
The International Criminal Court has shown no such enthusiasm in investigating incidents in Afghanistan. Despite evidence against American, Polish, Lithuanian, and Romanian military personnel, as well as CIA officers, for torture, rape, and abuse of prisoners, the judges closed the investigation, stating that it was “not in the interests of justice.” They were simply afraid of the sanctions imposed by Washington on the former Gambian-born prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, whose replacement, Karim Khan of Britain, quickly redirected his efforts to investigating the actions of the Taliban and ISIS, rather than prosecuting Western actors. The practice of double standards reached its peak in the investigations into the Palestinian case and the situation in Ukraine. The court completely froze consideration of the Palestinian National Authority’s attempts to bring legal recourse to the courts since 2018 regarding Israeli crimes committed in Palestine, and information on such cases, submitted by various human rights organizations, was ignored. Even when arrest warrants were issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in May 2024, none of the Western signatories to the Rome Statute, which had previously supported such a move against Russian President Vladimir Putin, rushed to implement them. The US administration even imposed sanctions on the judges who made the decision, accusing them of “attacking US allies.”
