African leaders have voted to give themselves immunity from prosecution for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in an African human rights court that does not yet exist, angering rights groups and puzzling activists on the continent. At an African Union summit held last week in Equatorial Guinea, a country often cited as one of Africa’s worst rights violators, heads of state and government decided that the African Court of Justice and Human Rights would have no power to hear cases against them. The court was formally created by the African Union six years ago, but it is not yet in operation, and it is not clear when it will be. A number of African leaders have complained that international bodies outside the continent, notably the International Criminal Court in The Hague, single out Africans disproportionately as targets for prosecution. In that light, advocacy groups said, the recent vote was puzzling. “Putting immunity in the protocol is completely at odds with the idea of delivering justice for the most serious crimes,” said Elise Keppler of Human Rights Watch. Some experts in The Hague said they saw the planned African court as an attempt to limit the reach of the International Criminal Court, which now has 122 member countries, more than one-quarter of them in Africa. The Hague court is one of last resort, meaning that it becomes involved only when national institutions are unwilling or unable to prosecute cases of large-scale atrocities. The court’s statutes say that no one can be immune from its jursidiction, including sitting or past government leaders, who often have immunity in their own national courts. The I.C.C. has indicted two sitting presidents — Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya — and a former president, Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast, is in custody in the Netherlands awaiting trial. Mr. Bashir in particular has campaigned to persuade other African leaders that the court is a neo-colonial weapon to punish Africans. The court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, who is from Gambia, has called the perceived anti-African bias “one of the biggest misperceptions about the court.” Though all eight countries whose citizens have been indicted are in Africa, she has said , five of them brought the cases to the court of their own accord, and the United Nations Security Council referred two more, Libya and Sudan. Only one of the cases, the one in Kenya, was initiated by the court’s prosecutors.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 23:17:03 +0000
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