With the announced withdrawals of South Africa, Burundi and the Gambia, the International Criminal Court (ICC) now faces the gravest crisis of its existence. The Court’s standing in Africa is in jeopardy as rumours abound that more states will follow. One way, however, for the Court to win over public and diplomatic opinion is to recruit its most legitimate and persuasive allies—the victims of atrocity crimes themselves.
As an example, the murderous rampage in Darfur, a signature crime of our generation, left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. Yet the voices of those victims seem to be missing from the heated debate over the ICC’s arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, even when he visited South Africa in 2015. As a result, al-Bashir and his allies have been able cynically to shift the focus away from the atrocities themselves and paint the standoff as a political confrontation between Africa and the “international community.” The same kind of fight played out regarding Kenya, where a distant prosecutor was no match for an elected president who could manipulate continental sentiment (as well as the evidence, the crime scene and the witnesses).
Contrast that with recent victim-driven prosecutions such as those of Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt, Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Chad’s Hissène Habré. In the Habré case, the victims improbably succeeded in creating the political conditions to bring Habré to justice in Senegal, with the support of the African Union. The role of the survivors permeated the case from inception to verdict, building popular support along their 17-year quest, ultimately making it diplomatically irresistible. Thierry Cruvellier, a frequent critic of international courts, noted glowingly in the New York Times that “[n]ever in a trial for mass crimes have the victims’ voices been so dominant.”
