DA slams ANC’s Rome Statute bill

PROPOSED legislation for South Africa to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) was not intended to achieve justice for international crimes, but would only assist in the evasion of justice, the DA said yesterday.

The International Crimes Bill was tabled in Parliament on Wednesday and sought to repeal the implementation of the Rome Statute Act and withdraw South Africa from the ICC, DA federal executive chairperson James Selfe said.

While it seemed the bill paid lip service to South Africa’s role as a leader in the African context, and as a champion of dispute resolution, the DA was combing through the bill and had made certain observations, he said.

Having previously tried to withdraw from the ICC, with no alternative for the prosecution of international crimes presented, the ANC was now seeking to confer jurisdiction over these crimes on domestic courts.

Jurisdiction was limited to crimes committed in South Africa, crimes where the accused or a victim was a South African citizen or resident, and crimes where the accused was present in the country after the commission of the crime, Selfe added.

For any prosecution contemplated by the bill to even begin, a warrant of arrest had to be applied for by a prosecutor. This introduced administrative delays that could allow an accused time to flee the state.

“Vesting this discretion in a political appointee, like the National Director of Public Prosecutions – currently Shaun Abrahams, who we know to be a lapdog for President Jacob Zuma’s cabal of cronies and cadres – is a recipe for disaster,” he said.

Administratively, a request for arrest issued by the ICC to member states applied immediately on receipt, meaning subjects may be, and ought to be, arrested on arrival in the country. This bill failed to achieve that, “probably deliberately”.

“The ANC has maintained the illusion that the decision not to arrest (Sudan’s President Omar) al-Bashir, a decision found to be unlawful by the high court and Supreme Court of Appeal, was a principled one. They claim they have ideological differences with the ICC, and on this basis they did not feel obliged to arrest al-Bashir.

“However, it is abundantly clear that this is false. In reality, the ANC’s decision was a political one, intended to protect a brutally authoritarian dictator in the interests of reciprocity and impunity,” Selfe said.

The impropriety of the bill’s prosecutorial mechanisms was also present with regard to investigations. While the Rome Statute allowed South Africa to outsource international justice, this bill would place the onus to construct and manifest a criminal case squarely within domestic structures.

It would fall to the Hawks to investigate complaints relating to international crimes, “a duty that they are ill-placed to carry out”. – African News Agency/ANA