Will Pretoria roll out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin if he decides to attend the Brics summit scheduled for late August in South Africa? This is what 74% of visitors to the South African site News24 think in a short online survey. The arrest warrant for war crimes issued on March 18 by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Russian president has taken on particular resonance in South Africa.
The country is to host the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in August, to which Vladimir Putin has already been invited. The arrest warrant "is obviously a matter of concern," Naledi Pandor, South Africa's minister for international relations and cooperation, said on Friday (March 24). In June 2015, the visit of Omar Al-Bashir, then President of Sudan under two arrest warrants from the ICC for genocide and crimes against humanity, left a trauma in the country. Pretoria does not want to go through what was an incredible diplomatic-judicial saga again.
Ten days before the 25th African Union summit, the government of then President Jacob Zuma had provided all its hosts with written assurances that they would be covered by the diplomatic immunity attached to their office. But as this summit of heads of state opened in Johannesburg on June 14, 2015, three judges of the High Court of Pretoria, seized of a complaint by the organization South Africa Litigation Center (SALC), ordered prevent any departure of the Sudanese president, the time to deliberate.
Twenty-four hours later, they demanded the arrest of Omar Al-Bashir, just as the former president was flying over the South African sky, heading for Khartoum. "God is greatest" ("God is the greatest") had launched Omar Al-Bashir while treading Sudanese soil.
Handcuffing a Head of State?
The South African authorities had had to wipe the plaster: the Sudanese president still resented this inglorious leak. ICC judges called on South Africa to come to The Hague to provide explanations, while civil society accused the government of trampling on the decisions of its own judges. Pretoria then campaigned against the court, threatening to quit its founding treaty.
Recently, South Africa has returned to a slightly more sympathetic position vis-à-vis the Court. On March 10, a few days before the announcement of the arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin, the government decided to withdraw a law that would have allowed the country to no longer be a party to the treaty of this Court. “South Africa's political and economic ties with other governments, heads of state or any other senior government official can never and must never again be an obstacle to the fight against impunity for atrocities,” warned SALC director Anneke Meerkotter on this occasion.
Handcuffing a Head of State? Many states, even democratic ones, see the idea of arresting a president as a nightmare, even if he is the leader of a totalitarian country. Arrest warrants for sitting heads of state always complicate diplomatic relations. “We are concerned about the situation of the people of Ukraine,” said Minister Naledi Pandor, while explaining that South Africa wants to continue its relations with the two countries and “persuade them to move towards peace”.
A matter of domestic politics
Since the arrest warrant was issued, the government has been awaiting "an updated legal opinion on the matter," the minister said on Friday. Like the 123 members of the Court, South Africa has ratified the ICC statute and would therefore, according to its judges, have an obligation to execute all its arrest warrants. The question nevertheless divides the jurists. Some assure that a country must respect the immunity of heads of state who have not joined the Court, as is the case of Russia.
Recalling that it has not ratified the ICC treaty, Moscow announced the opening of a criminal investigation against the prosecutor and the three judges who made the decision. In South Africa, the debate has become a matter of domestic politics. Vicious MP Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters denounced the ICC's "double standards", blaming it for sparing Western officials while pointing out that Russia had supported the ANC against apartheid. Ten days after its issuance, this arrest warrant targeting the head of state of one of the five permanent countries of the UN Security Council has already caused a lot of ink to flow.
