There was good and bad news for the International Criminal Court (ICC) last week, both relating to Vladimir Putin’s relentless war in Ukraine and the broader polarising effect of its geopolitical impact.
On the positive side the ICC signed its first working agreement with Europol, the European Union-wide policing agency. On the negative South Africa appeared to threaten to withdraw its support for the court because of its decision to issue arrest warrants for President Putin last month.
On the face of it even the good news, a working agreement between two international institutions, doesn’t exactly quicken the blood. Yet the agreement signed last Thursday between the ICC and Europol is in practical terms more significant than it first appears.
A constant thorn is the ICC’s side has been the fact that it does not have its own police force capable of tracking and detaining suspects. It depends on the goodwill of member states, signatories to the Rome Statute which established the court in 2002.
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And while this new agreement doesn’t mean the ICC will from now on be able to co-opt EU forces what it does mean is that it will be able to leverage their deep well of expertise and specialist knowledge, from evidence-gathering to criminal intelligence to counter-terrorism.
That co-operation is already happening, in fact, spurred by the scale of the horrors in Ukraine. Just last month Europol director Catherine de Bolle revealed that her agency’s experts had analysed some 7,000 images and videos, along with the testimony of 550 witnesses, enabling them to draw up a list of 150 Russian war crimes suspects shared immediately with prosecutors.
De Bolle’s acknowledgment that Europol was working “hand in hand” with the ICC came on the anniversary of the liberation of the town of Bucha, not far from Kyiv, a place now synonymous with Russian war crimes. Bucha was occupied shortly after Russia’s invasion began in February 2022. According to the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Russian troops killed more than 1,400 civilians, including 37 children, over 33 days of occupation.
More broadly, statistics from the same office suggest there have been 76,753 war crimes and crimes of aggression committed by Russia since the start of Putin’s all-out war.
Such evidence does not appear to impress South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, who refused to answer a direct question last week as to whether Putin would be arrested were he to visit the country in August for a scheduled summit of Bric (Brazil, Russia, India, China) states.
South Africa is a signatory to the Rome Statute and as such should be not alone willing but eager to detain the Russian president the moment he sets foot on its soil.
It has form on such issues, however, most notoriously when it failed to detain former Sudanese president Omar al Bashir at an African Union summit there in 2015, when all the talk was of the ICC as a “post-colonial proxy” dispensing “Western” (for which read “American”) justice.
Al-Bashir even met Putin for another “summit” in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in November 2017, where he not alone rubbed the ICC’s nose in his impunity but appealed to Mr Putin for “protection” against the US and offered a pitiful Sudan as Russia’s “strategic gateway to Africa”.
For what it’s worth Putin is today – as Omar Al-Bashir was then – in the crosshairs of international justice. That means South Africa must soon decide whose side it is on: the side of those who view the Russian president as a war criminal and fugitive from international justice or the side of those who see the “no limits” partners, Putin and Xi, set to sweep all before them.
Its decision to join joint naval drills with Russia and China in February may have been the first indication of how South Africa’s ruling class is leaning.
Ukraine’s plight is leading to closer geopolitical co-operation – but on opposite sides of a rapidly widening chasm.