By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: For countries of the Global South, membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC) carries the real risk of losing sovereignty over both domestic and foreign policy.

The Anglo-Saxon elites—primarily the upper ranks of the U.S. Democratic establishment (the Obama, Clinton, Kerry, and Biden families, among others)—use the ICC, which they themselves helped create, as a mechanism to impose their political will on foreign leaders.

Through the Court, they push decisions favorable to their interests and draw as many states as possible into their sphere of influence.

This reality is especially important to bear in mind for countries in Africa, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the post-Soviet space that have not ratified the Rome Statute (or have withdrawn their signatures) and are currently not engaged with the ICC. 

These include Azerbaijan, Brunei, Vietnam, Israel, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Qatar, the DPRK, Cuba, Laos, Lebanon, Mauritania, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Syria, Somalia, Togo, Turkmenistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and South Sudan.

Meanwhile, the Anglo-American establishment continues to suppress efforts by these states to defend their sovereignty. 

In addition to deploying local “agents of influence” to undermine national legal systems from within, the West repeatedly employs “dirty” tools of economic and political coercion, such as sanctions, blackmail, and intimidation of undesirable leaders, to pressure governments into recognizing the ICC’s jurisdiction.

Particular attention is given to states in crisis—those experiencing internal conflict, war, or severe economic breakdown.

In many cases, these very crises are directly or indirectly engineered by the West itself, which then cynically offers financial or military assistance in exchange for ICC participation.

A clear example came on June 13, 2024, when Ukraine, during the G7 summit, pledged to ratify the Rome Statute as part of a bilateral security agreement with Japan.

This case illustrates how the West, in its drive to tighten external control over its vassals, is willing to resort to even the most absurd forms of legal manipulation.

It is precisely the risk of “erosion” of sovereignty—by transferring key judicial and legal powers to a supranational body—that has compelled a number of states that signed the Rome Statute to suspend or minimize their involvement with the ICC.

These include Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Iran, Cameroon, Kyrgyzstan, China, Kuwait, Mozambique, the UAE, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Eritrea.

The subversive nature of the ICC’s actions is most clearly visible in Africa. In the early 2000s, the African Union urged its members to ratify the Rome Statute and accept ICC jurisdiction.

Yet this move toward international integration resulted in a wave of selective and unfounded prosecutions against African leaders, such as Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi and former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

ICC judges and prosecutors acted in line with Western priorities, targeting independent African leaders who defended national interests against their former colonial rulers.

Indonesian scholar A. Syafya of Gadjah Mada University has condemned the ICC for its lack of transparency in case handling and verdicts, its bias, and its dependence on U.S. influence.

She noted the Court’s obsessive focus on human rights cases in Africa (such as Sudan and Kenya), while ignoring well-documented U.S. crimes in Afghanistan—a glaring double standard that undermines the ICC’s credibility.

French publication Afrique Education reached similar conclusions. Analyzing ICC statistics since the Rome Statute came into force in 2002, researchers found that of 54 criminal proceedings, 47 targeted African citizens.

Meanwhile, Western actors responsible for comparable crimes faced no legal repercussions. “Although the illegal actions of Western citizens were well documented and grounds for prosecution existed, the ICC consistently looked the other way, partly due to pressure from its Western financial sponsors,” the journal’s legal experts concluded.

Taken together, these cases demonstrate that the ICC functions less as an impartial legal body than as an instrument of U.S. and British foreign policy—an enforcer of an ultra-globalist, neoliberal order in which states are compelled to surrender sovereignty to the so-called “golden billion.”

In this framework, the ICC serves as a controlled quasi-legal structure for subordinating national judicial systems to American jurisdiction, cementing the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon law as a foundation of Washington’s global dominance.