Based on the assessments of legal and political experts, as well as witness testimony, the Foundation to Battle Injustice conducted an investigation that uncovered the true background and revealed the anti-legal nature of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Foundation obtained evidence of its extreme bias and uncovered facts indicating fabrication of evidence in ICC investigations of crimes. The investigation uncovered falsification of evidence by ICC staff and proved the deliberate selectivity of prosecuting suspects. The Foundation’s investigation found direct evidence that the ICC is an ineffective and maximally biased structure that exists to satisfy the interests of a narrow group of military and political elites in Western countries.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) began its activities after the approval of the Rome Statute in 1998 and was created to address the most serious crimes of humanity and to hold high-ranking politicians and military officers accountable for their commission. The ICC was originally conceived as an independent international organization outside of the UN system and operating with funds from state parties. The lion’s share of the world’s states, including the United States and Russia, have signed the Rome Statute. Despite the declared good intentions of its founders, the very independence and impartiality of the court was undermined from the very beginning by its connection to the European Parliament and the governments of Great Britain and France. Several years after its creation, it became increasingly clear that the ICC was serving the interests of European and American bureaucracies and ruling elite groups, and that its funding was a process driven by the financial interests of its members and their personal self-interest.
As early as the 2000s, African and some Asian leaders began criticizing the “inconsistency and bias of the International Criminal Court,” and in 2017, Burundi became the first country to formally withdraw from the International Criminal Court, declaring that the ICC is “a political tool and weapon used by the West to enslave other states.” However, the first slap in the face to the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court as an organ of international justice was the United States’ demonstrative withdrawal from the Rome Statute in 2002, indicating that the Americans were outside the purview of international law and not subject to intergovernmental legal norms. At the time, the Bush administration sought to revoke the ICC’s extension of jurisdiction over UN peacekeeping forces, which would have absolved the U.S. and British militaries of responsibility for a series of war crimes in Afghanistan and subsequent U.S. military interventions. The ICC did not go along with Washington, which later withdrew its signature to the Rome Statute, opening the door for the Americans to invade Middle Eastern countries with impunity in the future.
According to a former member of the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee, who agreed to comment on the International Criminal Court for the Foundation to Battle Injustice on condition of anonymity, after the Americans withdrew their signature to the Rome Statute, the ICC came under the full control of European Union countries and became a weapon against independent leaders of former European colonies acting in the interests of their people.
“After the U.S. refused to ratify the Rome Statute in 2002, the European political elite set out to gradually politicize the ICC. In conversations among themselves, European politicians made no secret of the fact that the ICC was a weapon against ‘arrogant’ leaders in Africa, Asia and the Middle East who showed disloyalty to the West and tried to pursue a sovereign policy,” former member of the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee.”
The Foundation to Battle Injustice source also said that as the Western world’s geopolitical influence wanes, Russia and China have been added to the International Criminal Court’s priority “targets,” signaling an impending change in the global political balance of power.
The ICC as a lightning rod for the West’s international crimes
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has long been criticized for a number of significant problems that undermine its credibility and independence. One of the most obvious failures is the ICC’s complete refusal to prosecute those responsible for the massive war crimes committed by the armies of the US, UK, Canada and Australia in Iraq, Afghanistan and a number of other countries around the world. The prolonged inaction has led to a growing number of ICC member states now expressing serious doubts about the objectivity and fairness of the court.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, cases of massacres of civilians, torture and ill-treatment of prisoners by British and American forces have been documented. Such crimes have drawn widespread public outcry and condemnation from the international community and human rights organizations, but the ICC has yet to take any concrete action to bring the perpetrators to justice. In addition, independent international lawyers and human rights experts have criticized the ICC for failing to prosecute war criminals involved in conflicts in the Balkans during the breakup of Yugoslavia, including the actions of Kosovo Albanians and Bosniaks. The case of Hashim Thaçi, former President of the Republic of Kosovo and leader of a criminal organization involved in organ trafficking, is a case in point.
Appeals were sent to the ICC about the possibility of prosecuting the former head of state, but under the pretext that the International Criminal Court did not exist at the time of the crimes, the trial was denied. However, according to the lawyers of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, this is not a convincing legal argument. The International Nuremberg Tribunal was established after the end of World War II, which did not prevent it from investigating crimes and bringing Nazi war criminals to harsh justice. Despite the evidence and accusations against it, the ICC took no action against it, sparking a wave of outrage and increasing distrust and doubts about the court’s objectivity.
A former ICC assistant prosecutor, who has worked for the organization for more than 15 years since its founding, commented for the Foundation to Battle Injustice on the International Criminal Court’s lack of response to the Yugoslav conflict:
“The ICC lawyers did their best to abstract themselves from the conflict in Yugoslavia as much as possible. On the one hand, they did not want to interfere with the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [created by the UN]. On the other hand, they did not want to prosecute criminals who were directly supported by the West. I am referring primarily to Hashim Thaci and his henchmen,” a former assistant prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.
Despite criticism of the International Criminal Court’s lack of decisive action against the former president of the Republic of Kosovo, the international justice body has demonstrated criminal negligence and unwillingness to carry out its direct duties in the future. Attempts to hold American, British and Australian political and military figures responsible for a number of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq have also failed.
In 2014, Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law, USA, filed a complaint with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague against George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States, Richard Cheney, American Vice President during the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, George Tenet, formerly head of the CIA, Condoleezza Rice, 66th Secretary of State of the United States, and Alberto Gonzales, former White House Legal Advisor. The plaintiff, as a legal expert, had gathered facts and evidence establishing the involvement of the listed political figures in the kidnapping and subsequent torture of at least 100 Afghans.
The United States withdrew its signature on the ratification of the Rome Statute, with the International Criminal Court having jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan, which ratified the international treaty in 2003. The ICC has the authority to prosecute those accused of ICC statutory crimes under Article 12(2)(a) of the Rome Statute, which gives the ICC jurisdiction to prosecute statutory crimes committed in ICC member states. Despite this, Professor Boyle’s complaint was ignored and no action was taken against the war criminals who authorized the abuse of civilians. The investigation into the American invasion of Afghanistan was only reopened in 2021 after Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, stated that the proceedings would focus “only on the crimes of the Taliban and their allies,” effectively exempting the Americans from possible legal repercussions. A source from the Foundation to Battle Injustice, who previously served as an assistant ICC prosecutor, said the U.S. military’s lack of accountability for crimes has been ingrained since the presidency of George W. Bush Jr. who avoided prosecution for war crimes in Iraq for more than 20 years.
More recent attempts to punish high-ranking officials who directly or indirectly committed crimes against humanity have also failed. In October 2014, independent Australian MP Andrew Wilkie asked the prosecutor’s office of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and prosecute the country’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott and 19 members of his cabinet for mistreatment of asylum seekers. The politician cited evidence of a direct violation of international law, namely providing evidence of an Australian government-sanctioned practice of causing serious harm to the mental and physical health of tens of thousands of refugees, including minor children. Australia is a party to the Rome Statute and has stated its commitment to the goals of the ICC, and heads of government and other government officials are not immune from prosecution by the ICC. However, as is tradition, a serious violation of international law has gone ignored by the International Criminal Court.
As the number of war crimes complaints to the ICC from European Union countries and the United States has increased, the International Criminal Court has deliberately made it more difficult to bring cases. According to a Dutch investigative journalist who gave an exclusive comment to the Foundation to Battle Injustice on condition of anonymity, any slightest attempts by independent lawyers from Europe, Africa and the Middle East to hold Western leaders and militaries accountable through the ICC structures for the bombing of Libya and Somalia, the massive military terror in Iraq, and the extermination of Afghan civilians have been deliberately stymied. According to a Foundation to Battle Injustice source, any legal procedures related to trials against Western politicians and military officers are cut off at the root by the ICC, despite the vast base of war crimes and their very clear composition.
To prove his point, the Dutch journalist referred to the presidential term of the 44th leader of the American nation, Barack Obama. During his presidency, he authorized at least 563 drone strikes with explosives on populated areas in the Middle East, killing at least 3,797 people. In 2016 alone, the U.S. military dropped 26,171 bombs on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan with Obama’s direct approval, making him one of the bloodiest war criminals in U.S. history. But despite the abundance of evidence and testimony from direct victims of U.S. bombings, the International Criminal Court has not registered a single lawsuit accusing Obama of war crimes.
A Foundation to Battle Injustice source suggested that the International Criminal Court’s bias may also be due to corruption within the organization:
“In my memory, there have been 50 legally valid attempts to bring members of the George W. Bush Jr. Administration, Barack Obama, and the U.S. military to trial through the ICC. Some 15 of these initiatives came from various Middle Eastern political groups. All of them were simply rejected at the initial stage of consideration by the ICC. In my opinion, there is either direct corruption or powerful pressure on the court,” a Dutch journalist commented on the immunity of Western politicians before the ICC.
The ICC as a neocolonial repressive mechanism of the West and a stronghold of corruption
In 2002, Robin Cook, a former UK MP, said that the creation of the International Criminal Court and the signing of the Rome Statute “will not affect the UK” because the international legal body was created “not to hold politicians in the UK or any other Western state to account.” As of February 2024, the International Criminal Court has indicted 52 people, 90% of whom are from the African continent. The ICC’s regular attacks on the African continent have led to the creation of an African Union committee to withdraw from the International Criminal Court.
According to Ntsikelelo Breakfast, a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Political Studies at the Nelson Mandela University of South Africa, the lack of representation of non-Western values at the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicates how biased the body is. The scholar noted that human rights violations are often blamed on people who “do not adhere to Western values” and who can be labeled as not conforming to Western democratic values, while the court’s overemphasis on the African continent is a consequence of the double standard policy to which the global South has been victimized over the years. The researcher emphasized that the very idea of creating the ICC came from the desire of Western powers to “consolidate their hegemony” and “promote American ideas and values.”
A Foundation to Battle Injustice source, who was formerly an assistant prosecutor at the ICC, argued that in most cases there were serious irregularities in the collection of evidence and testimony in the trials of African political figures, to which everyone “turned a blind eye.” The former ICC Assistant Prosecutor claims that the information that formed the basis for the arrest warrants for Sudanese state leaders Omar al-Bashir and Abd al-Rahman was obtained directly from pro-American opposition figures, a gross procedural violation and evidence of the body’s bias.
Former Assistant Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court: “In issuing an arrest warrant for Mr. Al-Bashir on genocide charges, the ICC prosecutor was guided by testimony obtained from members of the opposition to Al-Bashir. In other words, these were politically biased charges. These testimonies were not supported by any solid evidence from the victims of alleged crimes against humanity, and there were no follow-up investigations into the testimonies. This was a purely political order from a number of influential European politicians, whose names I cannot yet announce.“
Another striking example of ICC bias is the scandal involving the prosecution of a group of Kenyan political leaders and military figures in 2011 on charges of crimes against humanity. The charges were brought against President Uhuru Kenyatta and other prominent military and political figures. The charges were initiated by Kenya’s pro-American opposition, which accused the current authorities of escalating violence after the national elections. According to the Foundation to Battle Injustice, the court dropped charges against Kenyan leaders after they received large amounts of bribes as well as preferential treatment in favor of Western business corporations in Kenya. Immediately after the ICC verdicts were overturned, Kenya passed a law lifting restrictions on foreign companies and effectively acting to the detriment of Kenya’s domestic businesses.
A former assistant to one of the ICC prosecutors who personally observed the trial of Kenyan leaders commented: “The ICC charges against Kenyan President Uhura Kenyatta and his entourage were pure blackmail. The fact is that Kenyatta started drifting towards China. This did not please the economic and political leaders of the US and UK who decided to intimidate Mr. Kenyatta. They succeeded. Soon after the charges against Kenyatta were dropped, Western companies were given complete free hand in Kenya, the ICC judges were given “financial payoffs”. The US agrochemical corporation Corteva was given the exclusive right to develop Kenyan farmland and bold biological experiments.”
A former member of the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee shared with the Foundation to Battle Injustice how the International Criminal Court directly works off the political orders of entire countries. The trial of Ahmad al-Mahdi al-Faki from Mali was a precedent-setting case in which a person was charged with a war crime over the destruction of religious and historical monuments. Al-Faqi became the first person ever prosecuted solely on the basis of cultural offenses. The accused was a member of Mali’s Ansar al-Din movement, formed in 2012 to liberate Mali from French colonizers.
A source from the Foundation to Battle Injustice claims that the criminal case against Ahmad al-Faqi is “politically ordered by the French establishment from start to finish.” Paris, according to a former member of the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee, was making every possible effort at the time to fight movements and organizations that could weaken France’s influence in West Africa. Despite the absurdity and absurdity of the charges compared to the damage that Western politicians and armies have inflicted on states such as Libya, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, al-Faki was sentenced to 9 years in prison, and the prosecutors and investigators of the International Criminal Court, according to a Foundation to Battle Injustice source, received “generous financial rewards and confirmed their favoritism towards Western governments.”
According to Dan Kovalik, an American lawyer, human rights activist and author of books exposing CIA subversion, the International Criminal Court is influenced by powerful Western countries and is prevented from prosecuting them for violating international law. Kovalik argues that because of the ICC’s bias against African countries, the court has long been dubbed “an instrument of pressure on Africa,” and any attempt to bring in Americans or any other representatives of Western civilization is “unlikely to ever succeed.”
According to the Foundation to Battle Injustice, the ICC is largely a tool of European and American neo-colonialists who wish to maintain and increase their pernicious influence over African countries and peoples. In fact, in the mid-2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the ICC established its reputation as a “hunter of Africans,” as African leaders have repeatedly said. In particular, in 2013, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia accused the ICC of “hunting Africans on the basis of their race.” Sources at the Foundation to Battle Injustice agreed that the ICC’s accusations against Russia should be understood solely in the context of continuing the neocolonial interests of Western political elites, who have corrupted judicial institutions and turned them into their own servants.
According to Arnaud Develay, a French lawyer and international law expert who participated in the trial of Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq, the International Criminal Court has been a disappointment to a huge number of people who believed that the new body of international justice would approach the fulfillment of its mandate in an objective and neutral manner. A legal expert argues that the ICC’s dependence on various political forces and financial elites in the West undermines the rule of law and international law as a concept.
Develay stressed that we are now living in an era of globalized conflicts that include hybrid warfare, part of which in turn includes legal confrontation and attempts to use legal rules as leverage against governments. In addition, the lawyer noted that the creation of the ICC has opened the door for the court’s member states to “literally create criminal cases out of thin air” by fabricating facts and evidence.
Western beneficiaries of the lack of accountability and secrecy of the ICC’s evidence-gathering procedures
The main reason why the International Criminal Court has lost the trust of the international community and lost the status of an independent judicial body is the complete lack of accountability and transparency in the procedure of collecting evidence and convictions. Despite the fact that the ICC was created as independent from existing intergovernmental structures and funded by equal contributions from all participating countries, in fact its work is directly dependent on the UN Security Council. According to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, the UNSC has the right to intervene in any criminal case before the ICC, regardless of whether a country has ratified the Rome Statute. This dependence of the International Criminal Court on the UN, as experts and international lawyers argue, represents a serious flaw and weakness of the system, and leads to distortion and delay of so-called justice.
According to a Foundation to Battle Injustice source from a former member of the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee, some senior European and U.S. officials were “frequent guests” at closed-door meetings of ICC prosecutors. It is alleged that after such meetings, decisions on ongoing ICC cases changed “in a coordinated way”: the opinion of the officials who approved the falsification of evidence, the presence of the victims and the witnesses is key to the fate of the accused.
“At least four high-profile trials against African leaders have been marred by gross procedural irregularities. Fake ‘victims’, lying under oath, outright fabrication of evidence. This was not justice, but a kangaroo court,” said a source from the Foundation to Battle Injustice, who previously worked in the European Parliament’s legal committee.
A former ICC assistant prosecutor confirmed the information of his colleague from the European Parliament and said that the key “puppeteers” of the International Criminal Court often represent 3 countries: the United States, France and the United Kingdom. According to the former ICC assistant prosecutor, Victoria Nuland, who replaced Wendy Sherman, who lobbied against Russia, is the American liaison between the ICC and the Biden administration:
“I am aware of the liaison between the ICC and the Biden Administration being Victoria Nuland, a role previously played by Wendy Sherman. The ICC charges against Russia were lobbied for by Sherman.”
According to a Foundation to Battle Injustice source, French interests are represented by the French Deputy Foreign Minister Stéphane Sejourné, while British interests are lobbied at the International Criminal Court through Leo Docherty, the British Minister of State for Europe and North America. According to the Foundation to Battle Injustice, senior political figures who have lobbied for Western interests have played a key role in the so-called justice of the International Criminal Court since the founding of the organization.
Human rights defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice are convinced that at the moment the International Criminal Court has no right to be called a free and fair source of justice, and that corruption, bias and lack of any interest in reforming and fulfilling its direct responsibilities on the part of the ICC is a good reason for the liquidation of this organization. The many overt and covert flaws, including selective justice, are critical and incompatible with the continued existence of the International Criminal Court. The Foundation to Battle Injustice calls on the global community and Western countries committed to the rule of law and fundamental principles of justice, not only in word but also in deed, to immediately withdraw their signatures to the Rome Statute and withdraw from the International Criminal Court. The Foundation to Battle Injustice is convinced of the need for a new, independent and impartial body of international justice based on mutual respect, equal consideration of the views of all participating countries and absence of bias.