The World

Human-rights groups will be cheering the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. And why not? There have been appalling crimes committed in Darfur – since 2003 some 300,000 people have been killed and over 2m displaced.

This is certainly an active time for the cause of international justice. On Sunday a special tribunal opened in the Hague to investigate the assassination of Rafiq al-Harari, the former Lebanese prime minister. Charles Taylor, the former Liberian dictator, is already on trial in the Hague before a special tribunal on war crimes in Sierra Leone. The case against Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord, is also underway at the ICC. And last month a hybrid UN-Cambodian court began the prosecution of “Duch”, a former Khmer Rouge commander.

But the arrest warrant for al-Bashir is the big one.

Not everybody, however, is convinced that it will serve the cause of either peace or justice. Alex de Waal, an very knowledgable Darfur watcher, has posted a devestating indictment of the ICC case on the “Making Sense of Darfur” blog.

De Waal argues that:  ”The Public Application is not in the interests of justice, peace and democracy for Sudan. Pursuing an arrest warrant against a head of state is tantamount to demanding
regime change, which is in contradiction to the international strategy of negotiating with
the Sudan Government to achieve peace and democracy. The approach is therefore a
gamble with unknowable consequences and very large risks.”

To those who say that the court should pursue justice impartially – and not take political considerations into account – De Waal points out (paragrapth 65, if you want to skip there) that: “According to the Rome Statute, the Prosecutor of the ICC is required to ensure that
any prosecution is in the interests of the victims and the interests of justice.”

He also makes the case that the ICC will find it very hard to prove its case of “genocide”. Indeed, according to De Waal, the court seems to have a very hazy idea of the ethnic make-up of Darfur. Coming from one of the people who has done most to highlight human-rights violations in Darfur, this is sobering stuff.