OTP Suspends Darfur Investigation

This is quite big news, and I hope it doesn’t get lost in the welter of voices discussing the collapse of the Kenyatta prosecution. Here is a snippet from the Washington Post:

The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court told the U.N. Security Council on Friday she is stopping her investigations in Sudan’s chaotic Darfur region for now because no one has been brought to justice in a decade and the council has done little or nothing to help.

Darfur’s situation is deteriorating and the brutality of crimes is increasing, but there have been no discussions with the council for “concrete solutions,” Fatou Bensouda said. She demanded a new approach.

Darfur was the council’s first referral to the ICC, which is seen as a court of last resort for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

[snip]

“It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to appear before you and purport to be updating you when all I am doing is repeating the same things I have said over and over again,” Bensouda told the council, which has been divided on how to press Sudan for cooperation. This was the 20th time the prosecutor has briefed the council on Darfur.

“Given this council’s lack of foresight on what should happen in Darfur, I am left with no choice but to hibernate investigative activities in Darfur as I shift resources to other urgent cases,” Bensouda said.

It’s never good news when any OTP investigation falters, but it’s particularly disturbing in the context of the first Security Council referral to the ICC. Unfortunately, as many have noted (Mark Kersten, Dov Jacobs, me), the Security Council has an unfortunate tendency to treat the ICC like a political football — referring a situation to the Court when it needs to appear concerned about mass atrocity, then abandoning it when an attention-challenged international community has moved on to a different situation. Darfur is a perfect example of that troubling dynamic.

There is, however, a silver lining to the OTP’s decision to suspend the Darfur investigation: it indicates that Fatou Bensouda is getting tired of being Charlie Brown to the Security Council’s Lucy. I’m quite certain the Security Council would have preferred the Darfur investigation to continue ad infinitum: as long as the OTP is trying to investigate, the ICC will get the lion’s share of the blame for the failure to get Bashir. Now Bensouda has cleverly shifted the terrain, making it clear that the problem is the Security Council, not the ICC. Whether the Security Council will care is an open question — but at least Bensouda will take some of the heat off the ICC regarding Darfur. The last thing the Court needs now is additional bad publicity…