South Africa’s president and ANC sow confusion over leaving ICC

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, sowed confusion about the country’s relationship with the international criminal court (ICC) on Tuesday by announcing its withdrawal, only for his office to retract the statement within a few hours.

Debate within Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) over membership of the court has heated up since the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in March for his role in the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children. But Putin has been invited to a summit in South Africa of the Brics group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in August and the Kremlin has said the Russian leader will take a decision nearer the time on whether he would attend.

Ramaphosa told reporters on Tuesday: “The governing party, the ANC, has taken the decision that it is prudent that South Africa should pull out of the ICC largely because of the manner in which the ICC has been seen to be dealing with these types of problems.”

Within hours however, his office issued a statement saying “The presidency wishes to clarify that South Africa remains a signatory (to the ICC).”

The statement said the “clarification follows an error in a comment made during a media briefing held by the governing African National Congress.”

South Africa is a signatory to the ICC’s founding document, the Rome statute, and would be obliged to obey the arrest warrant, but the government has long complained of what it deems to be the court’s double standards.

South Africa began proceedings to leave the ICC in 2016 after a dispute over whether to arrest the former Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, who visited for an African summit while under ICC indictment for genocide and crimes against humanity.

However, the government recently suspended those proceedings in the face of legal obstacles, and on Tuesday the ANC’s national executive committee put out a statement noting the decision at the party conference this year that “the ANC and the South African government must rescind the withdrawal from the ICC court”. At the same time it urged ratification of a protocol to lay the ground for an African court of justice and human rights.

“So the president appears to have messed up the message – ANC has decided to rescind notice of withdrawal from the ICC and NOT attempt to withdraw from ICC again,” Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh, a South African lawyer and director of the Africa programme of the International Commission of Jurists, said on Twitter.

“Someone in the ANC has erroneously briefed the president when in fact the ANC has taken a decision to rescind the withdrawal from the ICC not to commence withdrawal anew. Is there any quality control happening?”

Even if South Africa took the decision to leave the ICC, it would still be bound by its membership obligations, including executing arrest warrants, for 12 months following its notification of withdrawal.