mzeiya
Elder Lister
Great read!
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The body blows dealt by Nairobi have human rights groups questioning whether the court can -- or should -- prosecute atrocities in South Sudan and other African states.
BY MICHELA WRONG | JULY 15, 2014, 4:59 PM
CHARLES LOMODONG/AFP/Getty Images
When the supporters of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto began systematically attacking the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a neo-colonialist institution biased against Africans in the run-up to Kenya’s 2013 election, their prime concern was domestic: to ensure their champions escaped prosecution at The Hague. A publicity campaign that made clever use of social media was transformed into government policy once the two men were inaugurated president and deputy president, respectively. It then acquired diplomatic wings, with envoys from Nairobi crisscrossing the continent to drum up support, culminating with an extraordinary African Union summit last October at which it was agreed that African heads of state would no longer face ICC prosecution during terms in office.
So effective has the anti-ICC campaign proved that it is now having repercussions its originators probably never foresaw: South Sudan is likely to be just the first in a series of new African conflict zones where human rights groups and civil society organizations find themselves nonplussed, unsure what to advocate in light of the body blows dealt the ICC.
"The ICC backlash has created a major dilemma for us, no doubt about it," acknowledged the head of one human rights organization I spoke to, who asked not to be named. "Deciding the appropriate course of action has become a very difficult question."
Their quandary, however, is no philosophical abstraction — the privilege of Western-funded NGOs with headquarters in Washington and Brussels. Every journalist is familiar with the experience of returning to the scene of an atrocity and interviewing a cowed survivor who quietly mentions that, in the street, they regularly pass men who raped a daughter, killed a father. If the ICC no longer holds out even the slim hope of eventual retribution for those who funded and armed such thugs, what alternatives exist?
Read on... https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/15/has-kenya-destroyed-the-icc/
________________________
The body blows dealt by Nairobi have human rights groups questioning whether the court can -- or should -- prosecute atrocities in South Sudan and other African states.
BY MICHELA WRONG | JULY 15, 2014, 4:59 PM
CHARLES LOMODONG/AFP/Getty Images
When the supporters of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto began systematically attacking the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a neo-colonialist institution biased against Africans in the run-up to Kenya’s 2013 election, their prime concern was domestic: to ensure their champions escaped prosecution at The Hague. A publicity campaign that made clever use of social media was transformed into government policy once the two men were inaugurated president and deputy president, respectively. It then acquired diplomatic wings, with envoys from Nairobi crisscrossing the continent to drum up support, culminating with an extraordinary African Union summit last October at which it was agreed that African heads of state would no longer face ICC prosecution during terms in office.
So effective has the anti-ICC campaign proved that it is now having repercussions its originators probably never foresaw: South Sudan is likely to be just the first in a series of new African conflict zones where human rights groups and civil society organizations find themselves nonplussed, unsure what to advocate in light of the body blows dealt the ICC.
"The ICC backlash has created a major dilemma for us, no doubt about it," acknowledged the head of one human rights organization I spoke to, who asked not to be named. "Deciding the appropriate course of action has become a very difficult question."
Their quandary, however, is no philosophical abstraction — the privilege of Western-funded NGOs with headquarters in Washington and Brussels. Every journalist is familiar with the experience of returning to the scene of an atrocity and interviewing a cowed survivor who quietly mentions that, in the street, they regularly pass men who raped a daughter, killed a father. If the ICC no longer holds out even the slim hope of eventual retribution for those who funded and armed such thugs, what alternatives exist?
Read on... https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/15/has-kenya-destroyed-the-icc/
