How Relevant Is the International Criminal Court to the 21st Century Africa and Beyond?

Abstract

Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) was examining some non-African situations
by 2013, most of the Court’s indictees happened to come from African conflict situations.
As will be discussed later, this state of affairs was worsened by the arrest warrant on President
Omar Al-Bashir while he was then a sitting president. This made the African Union (AU) feel
unfairly targeted and, therefore, contemplate withdrawal from the ICC. Some African leaders
have also maintained slanderous charges against the ICC describing it in uncharitable identities
and questioning its modus operandi. However, given that the Court was established to dispense
international justice for the commission of core crimes, the AU’s contemplation of withdrawal
evokes some pertinent questions regarding the future of justice on the continent should the
AU eventually withdraw from membership of the Court. How justifiable is the AU withdrawal
contemplation? Is this the best of options? What are the possible alternatives for the AU? How
does the AU contemplation of withdrawal represent a conflict of interest? In which ways could
the Court be strengthened to dispense the international justice for which it was established? In
the wake of the aforementioned questions, this paper seeks to address the issue of how relevant
the ICC is to the 21st century Africa and beyond.
Dwelling on critical discourse analysis as a methodology, the paper employs interdisciplinary
perspectives featuring reflections on research in human rights, international law, political science
and other relevant areas of interest and speaks to such probing concerns. This paper concludes
that though the challenges the AU raises against the ICC are reasonably admissible, they are not
compelling enough to justify an AU withdrawal since they are not of the magnitude that deprives
the Court of its capacity to dispense justice. This means that the Court remains relevant to the
21st century Africa and beyond. The paper ends by proposing a framework within which the
AU could contribute towards making the Court more functional.