A significant number of national leaders who have committed inhumane crimes and ended up on the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) wanted list continue to wield power rather than being arrested. Concerns are being raised that the ICC has become a paper tiger, with its authority plummeting due to its lack of police power and enforceability, being ignored by major powers.
Joseph Kony, the leader of Uganda’s rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has been evading the ICC’s arrest network for nearly 20 years. Kony has been accused of 36 counts of war crimes and inhumane crimes since 1986, including forcibly conscripting boys into soldiers and kidnapping women as sex slaves. The ICC issued an arrest warrant against him in 2005. After the Juba Peace Agreement between the Ugandan government and the LRA in 2006, Kony is known to have moved his base to neighboring countries where civil wars are ongoing, such as South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, continuing his activities in those regions. In addition to Kony, figures like former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, should be handed over to the ICC for charges of various war crimes, but they still exert influence in their home countries.
The most recent leader to receive an arrest warrant from the ICC is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin was added to the arrest list last March on charges of war crimes including illegally migrating children from occupied territories in Ukraine. Initially, Putin seemed to be somewhat reserved in diplomatic activities in response to the arrest warrant, but he expanded his diplomatic activities and returned to an aggressive approach after his fifth inauguration on the 7th.
Putin visited Belarus on the 24th, where Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons are deployed, after demonstrating his close ties with China. While in Belarus, Putin had a summit with President Aleksandr Lukashenko. He then visited Uzbekistan, another ally, on the 26th.
The major powers leading the international order are also weakening the ICC by taking a confrontational stance. The U.S., which has not joined the ICC citing reasons such as the protection of its overseas deployed troops, has criticized the ICC’s recent arrest warrant request for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a U.S. ally, and is threatening sanctions against ICC officials. Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame in the U.S., criticized the West’s double standards towards the ICC, saying, “Prosecution against enemies like Putin are welcomed, but arrest warrants for allies are not. This is why the ICC cannot follow in the footsteps of the Nuremberg war crimes trials.”