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Maxine Rubin, Politicized Justice: Africa and the International Criminal Court, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Volume 14, Issue 2, July 2020, Pages 401–411, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijaa007
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Introduction
The Rwandan and Bosnian genocides that plagued the 1990s provided impetus for the passage of the Rome Statute in 1998.1 Four years later, in 2002, 60 states ratified the Statute, which enabled the establishment of the first permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC was created to ensure that individuals most responsible for committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes would be prosecuted.2 The Court is guided by the principle of complementarity, which provides that the ICC should only intervene in the event that domestic courts are unable or unwilling to carry out prosecutions. The ICC’s jurisdiction is also limited to its State Parties and to cases referred to it by the UN Security Council (UNSC).
The UNSC first exercised its referral powers in 2005 when it referred the conflict in Darfur in Sudan to the ICC.3 This led to the ICC’s first issuance of an arrest warrant for a sitting head of state – then-President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan – in 2009.4 This was a remarkable event because it was the first time the ICC utilized Article 27 of the Rome Statute, which waives the immunity typically held by state officials by virtue of their official capacity. Following the controversial arrest warrant, as well as investigations into abuses in Kenya and Libya, relations between the ICC and the African Union (AU) worsened as accusations of an anti-African bias abounded. After failed attempts to resolve the discontent between the AU and ICC through dialogue, and threats to withdraw from the ICC by several African states, the AU issued its ‘withdrawal strategy’ in 2017. Cumulatively, this epoch in relations between the ICC and African states is referred to as the ‘withdrawal debate.’
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