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Chad's government says it's withdrawing from the ICC
Chad's Foreign Ministry has announced plans to leave the International Criminal Court. It said that its effectiveness was "limited and uneven." Chad's leader is a military officer accused of repressing the opposition.
https://p.dw.com/p/5Hpmk Advertisement Chad's Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Monday saying that it had notified the UN Secretary General of its intention to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the international accord underpinning the International Criminal Court (ICC) .
Chad is the fourth francophone African country whose government is very closely linked to its miltary to take such a step in less than a year — following the coordinated exit by the juntas running Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger last September.
The ICC prosecutes individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity; it began operating in 2002.
The Foreign Ministry said that its decision followed "an in-depth review of the functioning of the International Criminal Court since it began operating in 2002 and of its record, whose effectiveness remains limited and uneven across different regions."
It said the court's own record of prosecutions revealed an "undeniable and egregious selectivity in principle, whether or not this selectivity is desired or subjected."
The statement then listed the ICC investigations launched since the court's founding, saying that nine of 13 cases concerned African states, while only four applied to other regions of the world and were "without any concrete progress" as yet.
It said that of seven individuals detained as a result of ICC investigations, only one hailed from a situation beyond the African continent.
The Foreign Ministry alleged that this demonstrated a lasting concentration of ICC cases focused on "the Global South in general and the African continent in particular." Chad also appealed to other African Union members to follow in its footsteps.
"This irrevocable decision by Chad in no way constitues a renunication of the moral imperative to provide justice to victims; rather, it reflects the conviction that national judicial systems and African judicial mechanisms are fully capable of carrying out this mission with dignity," the statement, signed by Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ibrahim Adam Mahamat, concluded.
Last Thursday, Chad's Foreign Ministry had also raised the issue of the ICC.
In a statement after talks between a Chadian minister and a US official for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Frank Garcia Jr., the government in N'Djamena said the US had urged it to reconsider its ICC membership.
"The US side expressed its concerns about the functionality of this institution and desired that Chad reexamine its commitment to the Rome Statute," the ministry wrote . Chad said that it "indicated that this request would be examined by the responsible authorities."
The withdrawal coincides with last week's vote to dimiss the ICC's chief prosecutor Karim Khan amid allegations of sexual misconduct .
The US, like Russia and several other countries, never ratified the Rome Statute and fully signed up to the ICC. However, past administrations in Washington had been broadly supportive of the court's work.
This has changed in particular since the ICC's issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, soon after Donald Trump won a second term in office in November 2024. The second Trump administration has often been critical both of the independent ICC and the UN more generally, under whose auspices the Rome Statute mechanism was negotiated.
While Chad now has a nominally civilian government, the same family with close ties to the military has been in charge for more than 35 years.
Former President Idriss Deby came to power in a military coup in late 1990. He was in office for more than 30 years before the news of his death in April 2021. According to Chadian accounts, the former general died fighting on the front lines against an insurgency in the north of the country, just a day after news of his election victory for a sixth consecutive term had been announced after a vote marked by protests and widespread arrests.
His son, another officer, Mahamat Idriss Deby, was named the head of a transitional military council after Deby's death, with the government disbanded.
In October 2022, he extended his interim mandate, prompting public protests that were violently suppressed. Dozens were killed and several opposition parties were banned in response .
Chad is still fighting an insurgency lasting roughly a decade in the north of the country led by two groups with rear bases in southern Libya. It also faces an influx of refugees from Sudan's civil war and various other soures of domestic unrest.
The three other West African nations to pull out of the ICC last September — Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — are all under supposedly interim leadership by military juntas after a 2020 coup in Mali, a 2022 takeover in Burkina Faso and a 2023 coup in Niger.
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