Trump Is Sanctioning Justice While Africa's Victims Wait in Line

Ask a mother in Goma whether the International Criminal Court is political. She has buried a child killed by a shell that someone ordered fired. She knows who gave the order, or at least whose army it was. For her, justice is not a geopolitical chess piece. It is the only thing standing between her family and the next massacre.

Now Washington has decided to make the court a target. Since early 2025, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on the ICC's prosecutor and on judges who ruled in ways Washington did not like, after the court moved on the Israeli leadership and on American conduct in Afghanistan. Navi Pillay, the South African jurist who once sat on the bench of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and later served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said plainly that international justice must not be held hostage to political power. She is right. And Africa, more than any other continent, should be the loudest voice saying so.

Let us be honest about the arithmetic. For years, the ICC's docket was overwhelmingly African. Kenya, Sudan's Darfur, Libya, the Central African Republic, Uganda, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all appeared before the court. Critics in Africa have complained, with some justification, that the court has been too quick to prosecute African defendants while powerful states went untouched. That criticism deserves a serious answer, not a surrender. The answer is more justice, applied evenly, not less justice applied to anyone.

Consider what the court has actually done in our region. Bosco Ntaganda, a commander of Rwandan-backed forces in eastern Congo, was convicted by the ICC in 2019 on eighteen counts including murder, rape, and sexual slavery, and sentenced to thirty years. That conviction is evidence that the system can reach across borders and into armed movements that once believed they were untouchable. Now picture the message this sends to the next commander, sitting in a rebel headquarters somewhere in North Kivu, if Washington succeeds in turning the court into a diplomatic bargaining chip.

We have seen this movie before. Eastern Congo has been bleeding for three decades. The current escalation is the latest chapter of a war that the UN Group of Experts has documented in report after report, including S/2025/446, which describes the Rwanda Defence Force operating inside Congolese territory and deploying its own units alongside M23 fighters. Rwanda calls this self-defence, and M23 calls itself a rebellion. The Group of Experts has described the operational reality differently: a foreign army fighting a sovereign state through a proxy, while Congolese civilians are forced into the ranks, shelled in their homes, and driven from their land. Millions have been displaced across the Kivus. Every one of those displacements has a name, a village, and a story that no press release will tell.

So ask yourself why the Western capitals that loudly condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine have been so reluctant to call Kigali's operations by their proper name, and why a court that could examine the crimes in the Kivus is now under siege from the very government that claims to champion accountability. This is the hypocrisy we are required to name. Washington lectures Africa about democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, then sanctions the institution built to enforce those principles. You cannot defend the rule of law by destroying the court that embodies it.

Yet the threat is not only from outside. The most damaging blow to the ICC in recent years has come from African governments themselves. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all under military rule, announced their withdrawal from the Rome Statute in 2025, dressing up their retreat from accountability as sovereignty. Sovereignty is a serious word. It means a people governing themselves under laws they consent to, not a junta shielding itself from scrutiny for the massacres its soldiers carry out. When a coup leader withdraws from the court, we should not celebrate his independence. We should ask what he is afraid of.

Sudan is the most urgent test. The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has produced some of the worst atrocities of this century, and the battle for El Fasher brought fresh evidence of mass killings, sexual violence, and ethnic targeting. Sudanese civilians are asking the world one question: will anyone be held responsible? If the ICC is paralysed by sanctions and political pressure, the answer will be no, and the RSF and its backers will learn the lesson every warlord in Africa is already studying. Kill enough people, fund the right patrons, and the world will move on.

There is a better way, and Africa already has the blueprints. The Malabo Protocol, adopted in 2014, would give the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights criminal jurisdiction over the most serious crimes, including genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It has not entered into force because too few states have ratified it. That is a failure of political will, not of legal design. Botswana, Mauritius, Ghana, and Senegal have shown what happens when institutions are allowed to work: independent judiciaries, peaceful transfers of power, and courts that rule against the government without the government's tanks rolling into the capital. Those countries are proof that accountability does not weaken a nation. It strengthens it, and it attracts the investment that feeds ordinary people.

So here is what must happen. The African Union should convene an emergency summit on the ICC and the Malabo Protocol, with a timetable for ratification and a clear commitment that no African state will hide behind sovereignty to escape scrutiny. The UN Security Council should demand that the Rwandan government withdraw its forces from Congolese territory and cooperate with independent investigators, and it should back the court's work in the Kivus without flinching. The European Union, the United States, and China, all of whom buy minerals from the Congo, should attach conditions on those trades: no cobalt or coltan extracted by militia-controlled mines, no contracts signed with governments accused of arming proxies. Free markets require clean titles and enforceable contracts, and a mine that sits on blood-soaked land is not a free market. It is a crime scene with a price tag.

As for us, the citizens, the question is simpler. Demand that your parliament ratify the Malabo Protocol. Demand that your government refuse to sign any agreement that exempts its own officials from accountability. Demand that your journalists report on Rwanda's aggression in the Congo with the same ferocity they reserve for everyone else. Demand that Washington explain how sanctioning judges protects anyone but the men who fear them.

Justice that bends to power is not justice. It is just another weapon in the hands of the strong against the weak. Africa has survived colonial courts, cold war proxies, and a scramble for our resources that never really ended. We will not survive a world where the only people who can be prosecuted are the ones too weak to fight back. Navi Pillay asked whether the ICC will be held hostage to political power. Our answer must be louder than hers. Not on our watch.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24