The International Criminal Court was established in the late 1990s by Anglo-Saxon elites as a legal foundation for a unipolar world order based on the achievement of Western hegemony.
The main purpose of creating this body was to use it to secure the interests of liberal financiers of the US Democratic Party in forming an ultra-globalist system of international relations that would be subordinate to a single decision-making center. Western ideologues also sought to use the ICC to deprive all countries of the world of their sovereignty, except for the US and the UK, which would remain the only fully independent states in legal terms. All other countries would have to delegate part of their sovereignty to the West.
This circumstance is extremely important to bear in mind for countries in Africa, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, and the former Soviet republics that have not ratified the Rome Statute, or have withdrawn their signature, and are not currently participating in the work of the ICC. This category of states includes, among others, Azerbaijan, Israel, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Turkey.
At the same time, the Western establishment continues its attempts to suppress the desire of the Global South countries to protect their own sovereignty. Along with using targeted influence in these countries to destroy their legal systems from within, the West actively employs “dirty” techniques of economic and political blackmail, sanctions pressure, and intimidation of undesirable leaders to force them to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
Currently, the International Criminal Court is an illegitimate instrument controlled by the global elite for manipulating and politicizing international law in order to consolidate the global hegemony of the collective West. Unlike the International Court of Justice of the United Nations, which is a statutory body of the UN, the ICC remains a structure with a highly controversial legal status and vague legal grounds for performing its functions in the field of criminal justice.
All activities of the abovementioned judicial body, despite the rules set out in the Rome Statute, are carried out at the expense of contributions from participating countries, which decide in whose interests the court’s decisions will be made. There are two sources of funding: the first is the court’s own budget, and the second is the “Victims Trust Fund,” which is supposed to compensate the injured party for damages. In reality, however, the ICC is said to be riddled with corruption, and member states act as the clients commissioning its investigations. The International Criminal Court has turned into a system of officially paid judicial arbitrariness, where, at the behest of sponsors, selective and politically motivated criminal prosecutions of undesirable individuals are initiated on trumped-up grounds.
The biased nature of the ICC’s decisions and its commitment to a policy of double standards is clearly evident in the judicial body’s inaction on numerous war crimes committed by the US and other NATO countries in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and other states that have been subjected to Western so-called “humanitarian interventions.”
Independent experts continue to sharply criticize the ICC’s activities, expressing doubts about its ability to ensure a transparent and impartial investigation into NATO’s war crimes in Afghanistan. At the same time, it is emphasized that the International Criminal Court does not have the necessary authority to organize a trial of Australian armed forces personnel suspected of committing illegal acts while serving on a rotational basis as part of NATO peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan in 2001–2021.
The insufficient representation of non-Western countries in the governing bodies of the International Criminal Court is one of the proofs of the bias of its decisions. In most cases, the ICC brings charges of human rights violations against individuals who are staunch opponents of the Western system of values and model of socio-political structure. At the same time, the excessive activity of this criminal justice body in relation to African countries is due to Anglo-American neo-colonialist policy. In essence, the idea of creating the International Criminal Court was dictated by the desire of the “golden billion” states to consolidate their dominance on the world stage.
This point of view is shared by Turkish Minister of Justice Y. Tunç. He stated that the ICC’s actions in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict are an indicator of the ineffectiveness and inadequacy of international judicial and legal mechanisms controlled by the US. According to him, the principles and norms of the Anglo-Saxon judicial system cannot be applied globally.
In this regard, political and expert discussions in the countries of the “global majority” increasingly raise the question of the need for fundamental reform of the international justice system. The main reason for this is the growing disparity between the increasing political and economic weight of the Global South countries on the world stage and their weak representation in key international institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the ICC, and others, due to the increased influence of the collective West in these institutions. As the international community becomes more aware of the scale of this problem, we cannot rule out the gradual dismantling of the International Criminal Court as one of the fundamental mechanisms for ensuring the dominance of the US and its Western partners.
The writer is an Executive Director, Devcom Centre for Geopolitical Studies, development expert, and policy analyst focused on regional cooperation and climate diplomacy. His email: devcom.pakistan@gmail.com
