[Patryk I. Labuda is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a Teaching Assistant at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. He is currently on exchange at Harvard Law School.]
The International Criminal Court (ICC) faces many problems. Some of them are well known, for instance its inadequate
budget, accusations of
anti-African bias, and
withdrawals from the Rome Statute. But there is a far more insidious cancer that is eating away at the Court’s legitimacy: complementarity. As with so many other developments at the ICC, it is the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that foreshadows some of the Court’s long-term dilemmas, many of which received too little attention in Rome. This post explores how the Prosecutor’s confused approach to complementarity undermines the Court’s mission in the DRC and, potentially, in other situation countries going forward.
The ICC and Congo
To hear Fatou Bensouda tell it, the ICC’s intervention in the DRC is something of a success story. The Court’s
track record there seems positive, especially when contrasted with other ICC situations: Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga have been tried and convicted, and Bosco Ntaganda is currently on trial. Another Congolese, Jean-Pierre Bemba, is the Court’s only high-profile convict to date, even if his conviction formally stems from the situation in the Central African Republic. Thus, with the possible exception of Mathieu Ngudjolo’s acquittal in 2012, Congo is usually portrayed as a beacon of hope for an otherwise beleaguered institution struggling to gain
legitimacy in Africa. But is this narrative of success compelling?
A cloud of suspicion has
hung over the ICC’s activities in the DRC ever since Joseph Kabila ‘invited’ the first Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, to launch an investigation in 2004. Kabila’s ‘self-referral’ succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: lacking a strategy for a country the size of Western Europe, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) initiated sporadic prosecutions which targeted only Kabila’s rivals, including Bemba who had almost defeated him in the 2006 presidential election. In stark contrast, the Congolese government’s crimes received no scrutiny in The Hague.
Thirteen years after Kabila’s invitation, the ICC’s neglect of government crimes is coming home to roost. The DRC is in the news for all the wrong reasons. Kabila’s refusal to relinquish power, despite being
constitutionally required to do so, has stoked mass violence on several occasions, leaving dozens dead in the streets of Kinshasa and other cities. After a series of damning reports (see
here and
here), last month the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights formally
requested a commission of inquiry to examine ‘recurrent reports of grave violations’. Most importantly from the ICC’s perspective, these reports show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the violence is part of a governmental strategy to keep Kabila in power at all costs. The pattern is familiar: each time the political opposition organizes protests, state agents – police and military – resort to deadly force. Yet despite thousands of cumulative deaths, reports of dozens of
mass graves, and even graphic videos of
summary executions by government troops, the ICC has been virtually absent from the debate about accountability.
Why, despite such overwhelming evidence of state criminality, has the ICC not investigated Kabila and his supporters?
