Press Conference by Permanent Mission of Sudan to United Nations

The International Criminal Court, unfit for its purpose and marred by double standards, was destroying peace processes in sub-Saharan Africa, David Hoile, an African scholar and public affairs consultant, said today at a Headquarters news conference sponsored by the Permanent Mission of the Sudan to the United Nations.

“The fault lines are all through the ICC, literally from top to bottom,” Mr. Hoile said.  “Even the Court’s most avid supporters, as early back as 1998, said that the Statute establishing the Court itself was seriously flawed.”  The Court presented itself as independent and impartial, but its membership represented only one quarter of the world’s population.

He went on to say that, with more than 60 per cent of its budget funded by the European Union, the institution was a European criminal court, representing European foreign policy and pursuing war crimes by Africans in Africa, while ignoring Western human rights abuses in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  Of the more than 8,000 official complaints about alleged crimes in 139 countries received from around the world, the Court had chosen to start investigations into only five — all of them in Africa.

Mr. Hoile presented those and other findings contained his book, The International Criminal Court:  Europe’s Guantanamo Bay?”, underlining that, while Europeans were largely ignorant about the Court, it had a very real impact in Africa, having destroyed peace processes in Uganda and parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and attempting to do the same in the Sudan.  The book was published in April by the London-based Africa Research Centre to coincide with the International Criminal Court’s first ever Review Conference, held in Kampala, Uganda, earlier this month.

The Court was also focusing on cases that were not in line with its original mandate, such as the 2009 opposition-rally violence in Guinea and post-election violence in Kenya in late 2007 and early 2008, he said.  “The ICC matters inasmuch as that what they’re doing in Africa has had a disastrous effect and will continue to have a horrific effect as long as you have at the very least a Chief Prosecutor that appears to be out of control,” he said, referring to Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s case for prosecuting President Omer Hassan al-Bashir of the Sudan.

He said good law evolved over years, but the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court had been rushed through in four weeks, not by lawyers, but by European Union-funded non-governmental organizations on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.  Moreover, the judges appointed to the Court were not the best suited to try the world’s most heinous crimes.  Owing their jobs to political horse trading, many of them were diplomats with no experience of working as lawyers or judges, and for whom the Court was “a retirement home”, he said, noting that the Court had cost €500 million, but had yet to conclude a single trial.

Asked why he had likened the Court to Guantanamo Bay, the United States detention facility in Cuba, he said they were both self-appointed international structures lacking legitimacy and denying detainees the right to due process.  Regarding alternatives, he suggested regional mechanisms such as an African court, and stressed the importance of “ensuring a level playing field and not making things up as you go along”.

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For information media • not an official record