The ICC and Africa

Early Cooperation

Africa was initially the ICC's strongest regional bloc of supporters. African states were crucial to the Rome Statute's adoption in 1998, and today 33 African countries are states parties, making Africa the largest regional grouping in the Assembly of States Parties. Critically, the Court's first four investigations were all self-referrals by African governments: Uganda (referring the situation involving the Lord's Resistance Army in December 2003), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2004), the Central African Republic (2004/2005), and Mali (2012). These referrals were acts of cooperation, not impositions of Western justice. African governments turned to the ICC to address atrocities their own justice systems could not, or would not, handle.

The relationship began to sour with the arrest warrant issued in March 2009 for Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, the first ever issued by the ICC against a sitting head of state (a second warrant, adding genocide charges, followed in July 2010). The African Union argued that sitting heads of state enjoy immunity under customary international law and that the warrant would undermine peace negotiations over Darfur. At its July 2009 summit in Sirte, the AU adopted a resolution calling on member states not to cooperate with the ICC on the Bashir warrant, creating a direct clash between AU and ICC obligations for African states parties.

The Bias Accusation

By the mid-2010s, the charge that the ICC was 'targeting Africa' had become a dominant narrative. Every one of the Court's early investigations and prosecutions involved an African situation. The Prosecutor's proprio motu (own-initiative) investigation in Kenya, authorized in 2010 and eventually charging President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto over the 2007-08 post-election violence, was cast by many African leaders as an assault on sovereignty. Burundi became the first country to complete withdrawal from the ICC in October 2017; The Gambia and South Africa also announced intentions to leave. The Gambia reversed course after a change of government, and South Africa's withdrawal was struck down by its own High Court as unconstitutional.

Defenders of the Court replied that most African cases were self-referrals, that African victims deserved justice, and that the Court's geographic focus simply reflected where jurisdiction and cooperation allowed it to act. The real problem, they argued, was not that the ICC was in Africa but that it could not reach atrocities in Syria, Myanmar, or elsewhere, because Security Council politics and jurisdictional limits blocked it. The selectivity, in other words, was structural, not a bias against Africans.

Worked Example: How Each Situation Reached the Court

The 'bias' debate becomes much clearer once you trace how each African situation actually arrived at the ICC. There are three triggering pathways under the Rome Statute: a state party referring its own or another situation (Article 14), a UN Security Council referral (Article 13(b)), and the Prosecutor acting on their own initiative with judicial authorization (Article 15). Mapping the African situations onto these pathways shows that only a minority were driven by the Prosecutor alone:

Read this way, four situations were invited by African governments themselves, two were handed to the Court by a Security Council on which no African state holds a veto, and only Kenya (and, with a prior consent declaration, Cote d'Ivoire) began with the Prosecutor's independent action. The pattern that critics call 'bias' is largely a record of African states and the Security Council, not the Prosecutor, choosing the ICC.

Moving Beyond Africa

Under Prosecutors Fatou Bensouda (herself Gambian) and Karim Khan, the ICC's docket expanded well beyond the continent. Investigations were opened in Georgia (2016), Bangladesh/Myanmar (2019), Afghanistan (2020), Palestine (2021), Venezuela (2021), and Ukraine (2022). The March 2023 arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin marked a dramatic departure from the earlier African-only pattern and directly targeted the leadership of a permanent Security Council member. This diversification has partly defused the Africa-bias critique, but it has generated new political friction with each situation, showing that the tension was never really about geography, but about the Court reaching powerful actors of any nationality. Notably, African victims and civil-society groups consistently supported ICC involvement; the loudest opposition came from leaders facing scrutiny, not from the populations they governed.