NAIROBI – The Sahelian state of Chad has announced its withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, formalizing months of tensions against the “biases” against Africa already contested at the Hague tribunal.
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The break comes a few months after the rupture decided by the coup governments of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the Continent and Venezuela in Latin America, in a complex phase also due to the search for a new prosecutor after the dismissal of Karim Ahmad Khan. The break of N’Djamena, reads a government statement, is the “result of a thorough examination of the functioning of the International Criminal Court since its inception in 2002, as well as its record whose effectiveness remains limited and geographically unbalanced.” The executive accused the court of having reserved most of its investigations for African countries and “without any concrete progress,” a reconstruction already denied several times by the ICC.
The break of the juntas with the ICC
Chad is a country of about 20 million inhabitants in the heart of the Sahel, rich in resources such as oil, gold and uranium. After the death in 2021 of its historic leader Idriss Déby Itno, in office for three consecutive decades, power passed into the hands of his son Mahamat Déby, with a de facto coup that opened the way to one of the several “transitional” governments emerging from the whirl of sub-Saharan coups between 2019 and 2023. Déby then called and won the 2024 presidential elections with 61% of the vote, in a competition considered rigged by the opposition and some observers. N’Djamena’s trajectory has already been identified with that of the openly coup governments of the Sahel, starting with the severance of relations with Emmanuel Macron’s France and the military troops deployed in the country.
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The ICC divorce seems to mirror its political and diplomatic line, insisting on the anti-African or Eurocentric biases that would mark the institution’s work. But there could be other influences, or affinities, with another actor who is (re)gaining ground on the Continent: Donald Trump’s USA.
The call with Garcia
The announcement of the break from the ICC “comes just as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has launched a campaign to dismantle the Court,” notes Tamara Aburamadan of Human Rights Watch, a U.S. NGO, recalling the phone call on July 23 between Chadian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Sabre Fadoul and the new U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Frank Garcia. At the same time, Aburamadan recalls, some African leaders had already called a decade ago to adopt a “mass withdrawal strategy” from the Court, only to clash with the hostile verdict of governments such as those of Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Tunisia. Today “geopolitics is different compared to a decade ago,” notes Aburamadan. The NGO has asked the AU to “intercede” for a step back from the break of Chad and the three coup governments.
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