Obed Bapela, deputy minister in the Presidency of South Africa told journalists that the ruling party chose to withdraw the country from the Court’s jurisdiction, Reuters has reported.
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As an ICC signatory, South Africa is obliged to implement warrants from the court.
Trouble has been brewing between the ICC and the South African government, which has been run by the erstwhile-banned ANC for over two decades, after it faced severe criticism for ignoring a court order to arrest Sudan’s president earlier this year.
So we’ll have to build on those particular reasons as reasons for the ICC having lost its direction, ” he said.
But the act event this event chose to leave the ICC, along with Bapela saying mighty realms “crush” pornography and go after “shellfish hobbies”.
South Africa’s government refused to arrest Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir, who has been indicted twice for war crimes and genocide by the ICC, when he visited Johannesburg on June 15 for an African Union summit.
President Bashir has spent the last half a decade looking over his shoulder, avoiding countries he deemed risky and only visiting African countries he saw as friendly due to their hostile stance against the ICC. The ICC indicted him in 2009 and 2010 for his role in atrocities in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where insurgents took up arms in 2003.
“South Africa still holds the flag of human rights, we are not lowering it”, he said, adding that parliament would now debate ICC membership. Significantly, 34 African States are members of the ICC.
The plan will also be submitted to the ICC’s assembly of states next month and to the African Union’s next summit in January, party leaders said.
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“We are proud that India has taken a leadership position in opposing the Rome statute that set up the ICC”, he told The Hindu. “In that way South Africa will be allowed under our law to host Heads of State as they would have immunity from prosecution”. He was accused of stoking violence in the wake of the country’s 2007 presidential elections, in which more than 1,000 people were killed.
