South African Communist Party

SACP denounces imperialist bias by the International Criminal Court

Saturday, 18 March 2023: The South African Communist Party (SACP) categorically denounces the unacceptable conduct by the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC has proven itself to be a supra-national institution at the service of imperialist states under their hegemony. This bias clearly shows why other states have not even bothered to be part of the ICC at all and why others have had to consider terminating being part of it.

March 2023 marks 20 years since the imperialist United States, as usual automatically supported by former colonial powers from Europe, invaded Iraq. The ICC ignored this, other invasions and conflicts sowed, fuelled and sponsored by the United States-led imperialist forces, and their consequences.

In justifying their invasion of Iraq, the imperialist forces used what arguably became a big and costly lie of the decade. Through their speeches, presentations, media houses, news agencies, and “independent” “experts” and “analysts”, to name but a few, the United States-led imperialist forces spread the propaganda that Iraq developed and had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Using the big lie, the United States-led imperialist forces invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003, also occupying it, with no less than 130,000 troops, for approximately nine years. The invasion resulted in the killing of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, with a massive destruction of Iraq. Joe Biden, the current United States President, voted to allow the invasion of Iraq. He was the chairperson of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

Twenty years later, the ICC has not issued a single warrant of arrest for or prosecuted any United States or European president, prime minister, or monarch as head of state, for the cruelty against people that they have committed not only in Iraq but also in other parts of the world, Africa and the Middle East included. The history of the ICC shows now firmly that it takes the side of the United States-led imperialist forces or those these imperialist forces support in conflict situations. To this extent, the ICC functions like the United States-led imperialist forces’ judicial-styled political instrument in their pursuit of their interests and agendas. 

Meanwhile, in a month that marks the 20^th anniversary of the historical injustice of the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led imperialist forces, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, and Maria Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of Russia, on allegations relating to the United States-dominated NATO-provoked war in Ukraine.

In Africa, the case of Laurent Gbagbo, Ivory Coast President from 2000 until his unjust arrest in April 2011 by politically biased forces supported by the imperialist French troops, and his unjust incarceration until 2019, will go down in history as part of the ICC’s legacy of bias underpinned primarily by imperialist interests in what appeared merely as a domestic conflict. Gbagbo’s arrest and incarceration for eight years under the auspices of the ICC occurred with no evidence. Ivory Coast’s former minister of youth development, Charles Blé Goudé, who was also arrested, faced the same injustice.       

The SACP calls on the world anti-imperialist movement to strengthen and intensify the struggle against imperialism, inclusive of the unjust role played by the ICC and its imperialist underpinned bias in world affairs.

Our Party acknowledges the contribution made in the just, anti-imperialist struggle by the revolutionary and progressive forces of Europe and the United States, who have nailed their colours to the mast in the imperialist centres by openly opposing and organising against their states-driven imperialism, imperialist agendas, narrow nationalism and associated stances.

Together, the working-class and other revolutionary and progressive strata of society should forge a world peace movement towards a just, peaceful and better world for all.