March protest, 2015, Downing Street. Demotix/ David Cliff. All rights reserved.(Benin, June 18, 2015) - Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's visit to South Africa was a significant missed opportunity to arrest him and transfer him to The Hague to face charges of grave crimes in Darfur. But it wasn’t a lethal blow to the International Criminal Court. Quite the opposite.
Context is important. The possibility that people accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity will face criminal prosecution is a relatively new phenomenon. In the wake of the post-World War II trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo, international justice went on a 50-year hiatus. Powerful people implicated in the worst atrocities could expect to live all their lives without fear of arrest.
Criminal accountability resurfaced in the early 1990s with the creation of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The treaty to establish the International Criminal Court was only adopted in 1998, and it entered into force in 2002.
