The International Criminal Court marked the 20th anniversary this week of the treaty that created it, with expectations growing about its effectiveness as it moves toward maturity. 

The so-called Rome Statute establishing The Hague-based court was adopted in the Italian capital on July 17,1998. Today, 123 states have signed up to the treaty.

“The court has established itself as the permanent address for trials of leaders who order or instigate crimes against humanity, war crimes on a massive scale, or even genocide,” said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s international justice program. Dicker was present at the statute’s adoption.

At the time, with the end of the Cold War and multilateralism on the rise, some questioned the need for such a tribunal. But the new millennium brought with it a wave of conflicts and atrocities, some of which have been referred to the ICC. 

The court has investigated 11 situations, from Georgia to the Central African Republic, and is conducting preliminary examinations of 10 more, including Afghanistan, Colombia and Ukraine. 

But it has only had a few high-profile convictions and some cases have been dismissed and two defendants acquitted.

The first 20

“My grade would be not bad, not great,” Johns Hopkins International Law professor Ruth Wedgwood told VOA. “I think a lot of what’s been difficult for the court is realizing that politics, including the politics of very powerful countries, would necessarily intercede and therefore they’d have to settle for smaller victories.”

One such instance has been the effort to refer the conflict in Syria to the ICC. Russia and China blocked a move in the Security Council in 2014, in a bid to protect the Assad regime from prosecution. 

“When Russia and China veto referral of the Syria situation to the ICC, it’s almost an invitation to commit crimes,” New York University Law Professor Jennifer Trahan noted.

The Security Council has the power to refer cases to the court. The only other way prosecutors can exercise jurisdiction is if the alleged crimes were committed by a country that is part of the Rome Statute or is in the territory of a country that is, or in a state that has accepted the jurisdiction of the court.

Faced with the blockage on Syria  which is not a party to the ICC — U.N. member states sought to go around the council, and in December 2016 adopted a resolution in the General Assembly establishing a mechanism to assist in the investigation of serious crimes committed in Syria since 2011. It will take place outside the ICC, but it opened up a potential route to justice and accountability. 

Growing pains

The court does not try defendants in absentia, so several cases have not progressed as alleged perpetrators avoid transfer to The Hague. There are currently 15 outstanding arrest warrants, including a 2009 one for President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir of Sudan, on charges of war crimes and genocide for atrocities committed in Darfur. 

The wheels of justice also turn slowly.

“We know from experience that the road to justice is often long and takes patience, perseverance and prolonged support,” said the Netherlands Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoka Brandt, whose country hosts the court. “The path set out in Rome has not been an unwavering line toward success, but nor could we expect it to be.”

The ICC has weathered the discontent of some members, particularly in Africa where some leaders complain it disproportionately focuses on the continent. South Africa set in motion its withdrawal in 2016, but withdrew it five months later before it went into effect. The Gambia did the same, but after a change in government, it returned. The Philippines set its withdrawal in motion this year, while Burundi completed the process last October.

The court is lacking some powerful members, including the United States, which is not a state’s party to the treaty. President Bill Clinton initially signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but President George W. Bush withdrew the U.S.’s signature. Russia and China are not states parties either. 

In addition, the ICC is plagued by financial shortfalls, inefficiency, trouble attracting and keeping the highest caliber lawyers and judges, and it needs more help carrying out arrest warrants. 

“The court itself needs to improve its performance  becoming more effective and more efficient — and the states that created it need to be more supportive diplomatically, politically and financially,” HRW’s Dicker said. 

Successes and disappointments

Reflecting on the ICC’s accomplishments to-date, its impact may be more in how it has become a part of the international accountability architecture than on the outcome of individual cases.

“The idea of the court has been a productive and important one in a kind of metaphysical and ethical terms,” said Wedgwood, of Johns Hopkins. “It really doesn’t have in terms of actual output a particularly amazing frequency of conviction, but it certainly has made the law of armed conflict and humanitarian law — it has given it a way to have a stature that it otherwise might not be easy to maintain.”

The court has had only a handful of convictions, including its first in 2012 of the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, who was convicted of war crimes for the recruitment of child soldiers and sentenced to 14 years in jail. Two years later, the court convicted Congolese militia leader Germain Katanga on four counts of war crimes for a 2003 massacre of villagers in eastern Congo. He was sentenced to 12 years in jail and ordered to pay $1 million in reparations. 

But there have also been disappointments. Most recently, an appeals chamber of the ICC voted to overturn the conviction of former Congolese Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for atrocities committed in the Central African Republic in 2002-2003. 

“The Bemba decision is really a disappointing result for the court,” NYU professor Trahan said. “Other tribunals occasionally have had disappointing verdicts and they have survived as institutions. I think we want to learn the lessons from this and help the court move on in the best way it can.” 

The next 20

Looking ahead, as the court passes from its formative years into maturity, its supporters hope to see it become stronger and more efficient. 

“I want to see an effective court and I want to see situations where the court has found opportunities to have an impact in conflict zones and in places around the world where crimes are happening,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues under President Barack Obama. 

“The world — and that part of the world that believes in the rule of law — for that community the ICC is more important than ever,” HRW’s Dicker said. “Certainly more important and more relevant than it was 20 years ago when its treaty was finished in Rome at a point in time when people were legitimately asking would this court ever have any cases?”

“Ideally, 20 more states parties, regular proceedings before the ICC that are done efficiently and in a credible way and that advance international criminal justice,” said Lichtenstein’s U.N. Ambassador, Christian Wenaweser, who is a former President of the Assembly of States Parties of the court. “But I think more importantly, an understanding that the worst crimes under international law have to be investigated and prosecuted as part also of a country moving forward after a conflict.”
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An entire generation has been born since Nelson Mandela’s 1990 release from a South African prison, where he spent almost three decades for his anti-apartheid activism.

Ndaba Mandela wants to make sure those young people understand his grandfather’s role – and his values – in fighting for racial equality and later in trying to heal divisions as South Africa’s first black president.

“That is the very reason why I wrote this book,” Ndaba Mandela says of “Going to the Mountain” (Hachette). His goal with the memoir – released last month, in time for Wednesday’s 100th anniversary of the late leader’s birth – is to show the elder Mandela “not as this huge, great icon” but as a supportive grandfather figure they might relate to.

The 35-year-old shared views of his grandfather – who died in late 2013 at age 95 – both in the book and in a recent visit to VOA headquarters here. Ndaba describes him as “courageous” and “fearless” in his quest to end South Africa’s white minority rule, but says that commitment came at great personal cost.

“That is a man who went against the system, who sacrificed his family, sacrificed his own life for the greater good of his people,” Ndaba tells VOA, alluding to his grandfather’s 27 years in detention.

It’s a complicated, extended family, given Mandela’s three marriages and five children. Ndaba’s father was Makgatho Mandela, “the Old Man’s second son by his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase,” he writes, using a term of affection.  

Mandela was imprisoned while that son grew up and became a street hustler in Soweto. Ndaba says his own childhood was chaotic and impoverished, with his parents caught up in alcohol and sometimes fighting bitterly.

“A lot of the time, I would eat at my neighbors’ house, you know, when my parents couldn’t afford to get dinner for me,” he says. “… By any standard, I grew up in a broken home.”

In 1989, 7-year-old Ndaba met his grandfather at Victor Verster Prison, from which the leader was freed several months later. The boy was 11 when he moved in with Mandela and his staff in a house in Johannesburg’s Houghton suburb. He would spend much of the next two decades there – being cared about, and then caring for, the Old Man.

Subtitled “Life Lessons From My Grandfather,” the book explores the older man’s motivations and approaches.

Among those lessons:

“Nonviolence is a strategy,” Ndaba writes, quoting the Old Man. His grandfather subscribed to Gandhi’s strategy “of noncooperation and peaceful but unstoppable resistance. … He was a judicious leader who understood the power of doing the right thing until it overwhelms the wrong thing.”

Education is essential. Nelson Mandela “valued education because it was something that was stripped away” from blacks, says Ndaba, who admits he himself at one point “didn’t perform well at school” and had “a rocky adolescence.” Like his grandfather, he went on to earn a college degree.

Weeks after becoming president in 1994, Mandela established what became the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, donating about a third of his presidential salary every year, his grandson writes. As the elder man had told parliament, “The emancipation of people from poverty and deprivation is most centrally linked” to quality education.

Respect your heritage. The phrase “going to the mountain” refers to ceremonial circumcision – a monthlong rite of passage for young men in the Xhosa ethnic group. Ndaba was almost 21 when he underwent cutting and related psychological and spiritual testing. It was a turning point in his relationship with his grandfather, who then “expected critical thinking and welcomed civilized disagreements,” he writes. “… From the time I was a kid, I knew I could depend on him. This is when he knew he could depend on me.”

Don’t expect change all at once. When Ndaba eventually realized that his grandfather had orchestrated his parents’ separation and also kept them away from him, he writes, “I struggled to forgive him.”

Ndaba’s mother, Zondi, was already gravely ill when he learned that she had HIV/AIDS. She died of its complications in 2003, though a family press release attributed her death to pneumonia.

Ndaba writes that Mandela tried to address the country’s AIDS epidemic in 1991 by promoting safe-sex education, but backed off when accusations that he was “encouraging promiscuity” threatened his political prospects. When Ndaba’s father succumbed to the same disease in early 2005, Mandela called a press conference “to announce that my son has died of AIDS.”

“It’s impossible to overstate what this meant to the millions of people who live in fear of seeking help or disclosing their HIV status and to the millions more people who loved them,” writes Ndaba Mandela, now an ambassador for UNAIDS, the United Nations effort to curb the disease.   

Show leadership through service. Mandela was a man of “integrity, humility,” one who “dived into public service,” his grandson says. “A leader is not someone who says, ‘Look at me, I’m the best’ – a leader is there to serve.”

For Ndaba, service comes through Africa Rising, a nonprofit that he and cousin Kweku Mandela formed in 2009 to improve the continent’s socioeconomics. “We need to empower young Africans,” he says, “to give them a heightened sense of pride and confidence in being African.”

This report originated in VOA’s English to Africa Service.
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Armed separatists fighting for the creation of an English-speaking state in Cameroon have abducted at least seven traditional rulers they accuse of collaborating with the government.  Some of the leaders are also accused of calling for the participation in this year’s presidential poll, against the wishes of the armed groups.

As a choral group of the Our Lady of Victories Catholic cathedral in Yaounde sings at an inter-religious church service to pray for peace to return and for the kidnapped traditional rulers to be freed, Reverend Edward Njini of the Baptist church says it is unfortunate that the separatists have targeted traditional rulers who are simply custodians of ancestral values.

“We are praying for them to have courage,” he said.

The chief of Wokeka village, Njoke Johnson Njombe, is one of the abducted leaders.  In a video released by the separatists, he urged all English-speaking Cameroonians in the northwest and southwest regions not to vote in the October 7 presidential election.

“I am telling all the chiefs of the southwest region to come out and support the Ambazonian struggle so that the Ambazonia people can rightfully get their independence which rightfully belongs to them.”

Ambazonia is the name separatists have given to their would-be state in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions.  Most of the central African country speaks French.

Johnson Njombe was abducted last Friday along with six of his peers from their homes in and around the town of Buea and taken to unknown destinations.

The chiefs had encouraged people to vote on election day, and allegedly cooperated with security forces to flush out suspected separatists.

The government of Cameroon has called for calm and assured the population the military is working to free the traditional rulers.

The separatists have grown increasingly aggressive in recent months.  Dozens of policemen and government administrators have been abducted within the past two weeks.  In March, the separatists kidnapped about 40 people including Ivo Leke Tambo, a senior government official.

The government says hundreds of people, including more than a hundred policemen and soldiers, have died in violence since January, when Nigeria detained and then extradited separatist leader Ayuk Tabe Julius and 46 other alleged separatists to Cameroon.

The separatist groups are demanding the 47 detainees, who have not been seen in public, be released.

 
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The World Health Organization says it expects the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo to be over on July 24. That will mark 42 days, two incubation periods of 21 days each, since the last patient infected with the Ebola virus was released from care.

The countdown toward the end of the Ebola outbreak in the DRC started on June 12. If no other cases of this fatal disease are identified by July 24, the DRC’s Ministry of Health will announce the end of the disease the following day in an elaborate ceremony in the capital, Kinshasa.

The WHO said from April 4, when Ebola was first detected, through July 9, there have been 38 confirmed cases, including 29 deaths. This is the ninth outbreak of this fatal disease in DRC in the past four decades.

WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told VOA the World Health Organization and partners were able to contain the virus in record time because of lessons learned from the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014 and ‘15. That epidemic killed more than 11,000 people.

She said everyone involved in the operation reacted rapidly and robustly to this emergency and better use was made of the tools available for fighting Ebola.

“This time,” she added, “we had a new tool that we did not have before, a vaccine. And, potentially, this also made it easier to explain to the population that even if it is a serious disease, we can stop it and we have a vaccine to help stop it.”

It only takes one case of Ebola to set off a fast-moving epidemic. So, Chaib said it is important to quickly mobilize to combat the disease.

She said WHO and partners will not let down their guard. Active surveillance for Ebola continues, she said, and every suspected case will be promptly investigated.

She said a national survivors association is being created to provide essential medical follow-up and psycho-social support to those who have been stricken with the disease and, fortunately, have lived to tell the tale.
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