THE HAGUE: For a few hours last week, the International Criminal Court looked poised to take a Libyan warlord into custody. Instead, member state Italy sent the head of a notorious network of detention centers back home.
That has left the court without a single trial ahead for the first time since it arrested its first suspect in 2006. And it’s now facing serious external pressure, notably from US President Donald Trump.
Though its docket remains empty, the court still wields an $200 million annual budget and a large number of legal eagles keen to lay their hands on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The lack of trials damages the court’s reputation,” said Danya Chaikel of the International Federation for Human Rights. “The point of the ICC is to investigate and prosecute those most responsible for international crimes.”
Empty courtrooms show how hard it is to end impunity
The only permanent global court of last resort to prosecute individuals responsible for the world’s most heinous atrocities has not been in this position for almost two decades.
Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga became the first person convicted by court in The Hague. In 2012, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for conscripting child soldiers.
Since Lubanga’s trial began, the court has had a slow but steady stream of proceedings. To date it has convicted 11 people and three verdicts are pending.
It has issued 32 unsealed arrest warrants. Those suspects range from Netanyahu and Putin to Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and Gamlet Guchmazov, accused of torture in the breakaway region of South Ossetia in Georgia.
But it faces numerous challenges. Trump, on his first day in office, reinstated an executive order from his previous term sanctioning court staff. A more damaging piece of legislation, which would sanction the court as an institution, has passed one chamber of Congress but is stalled in the Senate for now due to opposition from Democrats.
Putin will probably remain beyond court’s reach
The previous chief prosecutor, Gambian Fatou Bensouda, described being the subject of “thug-style tactics” while she was in office. The court was the victim of a cybersecurity attack in 2023 that left systems offline for months and some technical issues have still not been resolved. In 2022, the Dutch intelligence service said it had foiled a sophisticated attempt by a Russian spy using a false Brazilian identity to work as an intern at the court.
The current prosecutor, British lawyer Karim Khan, has requested a record-breaking 24 arrest warrants. But many suspects — like Putin — will probably remain beyond the reach of the court.
Neither Russia nor Israel are members of the court and do not accept its jurisdiction, making it highly unlikely those countries would extradite their citizens, let alone their leaders, to the ICC.
“They haven’t issued arrest warrants for people who they are likely to arrest,” says Mark Kersten, an international criminal justice expert at University of the Fraser Valley in Canada.
Ultimately, countries are responsible for physically apprehending people and bringing them to The Hague, says Chaikel, whose group oversees nearly 200 human rights organizations worldwide.
Many of the court’s 125 member states are unwilling to arrest suspects for political reasons. Mongolia gave Putin a red-carpet welcome for a state visit last year, ignoring the obligation to apprehend him. South Africa and Kenya refused to arrest former Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir when he visited. The 81-year-old was ousted from power in a coup in 2019 but the authorities in Sudan have still refused to hand him over to the ICC.
Unwanted attention to Italy’s migration policies
Italy claims the ICC warrant for Libyan warlord Ossama Anjiem had procedural errors. He was released this month by an order of Rome’s Court of Appeal. “It was not a government choice,” Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni told reporters.
But Italy, which was a founding member of the court, may have had its own reasons for not executing the warrant. Italy needs the Tripoli government to prevent waves of migrants from setting out on smugglers boats. Any trial in The Hague of the warlord could not only upset that relationship, but also bring unwanted attention to Italy’s migration policies and its support of the Libyan coast guard, which it has financed to prevent migrants from leaving.
On Wednesday, three men who say they were mistreated by Anjiem, also known as Ossama Al-Masri, while in Libyan detention centers told a packed conference in Italy’s lower house of parliament that they want justice for themselves and others who died before making it to Italy.
David Yambio, a South Sudanese migrant who said he had cooperated with the ICC investigation, called Al-Masri’s repatriation “a huge betrayal. A huge disappointment.”
There is little consequence for countries who fail to arrest those wanted by the court. Judges found that South Africa, Kenya and Mongolia failed to uphold their responsibilities but by then, the wanted men had already left.
International Criminal Court has Putin, Netanyahu in its sights, yet its courtrooms are empty
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International Criminal Court has Putin, Netanyahu in its sights, yet its courtrooms are empty
- Though its docket remains empty, the court still wields an $200 million annual budget
- The International Criminal Court has found itself without a single trial ahead for the first time in years
‘Keep dreaming’: NATO chief says Europe can’t defend itself without US
BRUSSELS: NATO chief Mark Rutte warned Monday Europe cannot defend itself without the United States, in the face of calls for the continent to stand on its own feet after tensions over Greenland.
US President Donald Trump roiled the transatlantic alliance by threatening to seize the autonomous Danish territory — before backing off after talks with Rutte last week.
The diplomatic crisis sparked gave fresh momentum to those advocating for Europe to take a tougher line against Trump and break its military reliance on Washington.
“If anyone thinks here again, that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US — keep on dreaming. You can’t,” Rutte told lawmakers at the European Parliament.
He said that EU countries would have to double defense spending from the five percent NATO target agreed last year to 10 percent and spend “billions and billions” on building nuclear arms.
“You would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella,” Rutte said. “So hey, good luck.”
The former Dutch prime minister insisted that US commitment to NATO’s Article Five mutual defense clause remained “total,” but that the United States expected European countries to keep spending more on their militaries.
“They need a secure Euro-Atlantic, and they also need a secure Europe. So the US has every interest in NATO,” he said.
The NATO head reiterated his repeated praise for Trump for pressuring reluctant European allies to step up defense spending.
He also appeared to knock back a suggestion floated by the EU’s defense commissioner Andrius Kubilius earlier this month for a possible European defense force that could replace US troops on the continent.
“It will make things more complicated. I think Putin will love it. So think again,” Rutte said.
On Greenland, Rutte said he had agreed with Trump that NATO would “take more responsibility for the defense of the Arctic,” but it was up to Greenlandic and Danish authorities to negotiate over US presence on the island.
“I have no mandate to negotiate on behalf of Denmark, so I didn’t, and I will not,” he said.
Rutte reiterated that he had stressed to Trump the cost paid by NATO allies in Afghanistan after the US leader caused outrage by playing down their contribution.
“For every two American soldiers who paid the ultimate price, one soldier of an ally or a partner, a NATO ally or a partner country, did not return home,” he said.
“I know that America greatly appreciates all the efforts.”
