14 May 2024
Mr. President,
The position of the Russian Federation that politicized activities of the so-called International Criminal Court (ICC) are unacceptable remains unchanged. Therefore there is no point having in this Chamber a representative of the puppet institution, which openly serves the interests of Western states. The ICC has nothing to do with justice.
The work of the ICC in Libya is the best proof that we are right. Let us try to assess it objectively in terms of its contribution to the maintenance of international peace and security, as the UN Security Council should do. The Council is not a place for ritualistic words, but a body with a toolkit and a mandate for practical action.
We have studied the ICC report on the situation in Libya and learned from it that the Prosecutor’s Office plans to finalize all tracks of investigation by the end of 2025. Thus, the investigation of the situation has taken nothing less than 14 years. With this in mind, I cannot but recall that the entire activity of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which addressed the most massive and heinous crimes in the history of humanity took less than two years from investigation to execution of sentence.
Since the ICC Prosecutor’s Office has decided to terminate its investigative work, it is time for us to take stock and look at what the Court has been doing all these years in Libya.
The first uncontested fact is that the ICC submitted to the Security Council 27 reports, which boiled down to explaining why the investigation was failing. The Council devoted 27 meetings to their consideration. During that time, the ICC Prosecutor’s Office changed three prosecutors.
The Security Council referred the situation in Libya to the ICC in 2011, at the height of the Libyan conflict. The Court issued arrest warrants against Gaddafi, his son and his intelligence chief in a matter of days. From that point on, the ICC normally blamed its lack of action in Libya on the dire security situation on the ground. However, in the midst of the conflict, this did not prevent the ICC from acting quickly. In the absence of verified information, the Court has been known for using “fake news” to formulate charges.
Not a single arrest warrant was issued against the rebels. And this is despite the fact that Libya’s statehood was destroyed with the assistance of NATO’s democratic combat aviation. The ICC was not interested in the crimes of other parties to the conflict, including the war crimes of the NATO coalition.
I can recall that in order to do this trick, the infamous International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had to create a special commission to assess the actions of NATO. The ICC does not need such a commission, for everyone there knows for sure that NATO is not capable of committing crimes.
May I remind you that soon afterwards the former Libyan leader, M. Gaddafi, whom the ICC had put on the international wanted list, was brutally murdered. The ICC investigators turned a blind eye to this crime. Saif Gaddafi is still wanted by the ICC, despite the fact that he has already been convicted by a Libyan court and released under amnesty. It means that the ICC has disregarded the principle one crime – one punishment. At the same time, the case against Libya’s intelligence chief was suspended as inadmissible because of a parallel trial in a Libyan court. Two other accused members of Gaddafi armed forces died.
At the end of the day, what should matter for the Security Council is that the ICC has become complicit in the destruction of Libyan statehood and the impunity of the perpetrators of that crime, with grave implications for the peace and security of the entire region.
Since then, the ICC’s activity has essentially come to a halt. To camouflage its idleness, the so-called Court informed UNSC that it was investigating potential crimes against humanity committed against migrants and refugees.
In that regard, two points are worth raising. First, the reason for migrants flowing from that country was the destruction of Libyan statehood. Second, according to Western NGOs, the main responsibility for crimes against migrants lies with EU states and the EU border agency Frontex, who are responsible for the interception of distressed asylum seekers in the Mediterranean and ensuring their forced return to Libya. The ICC has been receiving requests from these NGOs to look into the activities of European migration authorities in the Mediterranean. But instead, the ICC Prosecutor’s Office is investigating migration crimes in cooperation with (and has even become a member of) the Eurojust-based Joint Investigation Team.
There is an obvious conflict of interest. According to its Statute, the ICC has to test European investigations against the principle of complementarity, does it not, Mr. Khan? But instead of doing so, the ICC joins the investigation without second thought, as if European investigators needed extra capacity and the ICC was a technical assistance body for rich countries. And this is happening to an investigation of the deaths of thousands of migrants, violence, kidnappings and, most importantly, the willful inaction of European states as regards migrant boats in distress.
In this case, it is not surprising that the investigation, which has been going on for 7 years, failed to yield any results.
Mr. President,
Last year, issuance of four classified arrest warrants in relation to the situation in Libya was announced. A reasonable question begs itself: from whom and for what purpose were they classified? The ICC could have made a closed report only for the members of the Security Council or communicated this information in a closed meeting. The Security Council has all the tools to work with classified information. We are not professors who engage in theoretical deliberations about impunity, but delegations that should be dealing with the practical issues of peaceful settlement. How can information that is crucial for the peace process be concealed from the Council? Who exactly are the accused, what forces do they represent, are they involved in the peace process in Libya? These are very relevant questions that are directly related to the Council’s fulfillment of its mandate under the Charter of the United Nations.
ICC’s preoccupation with “secret warrants” also raises concern from the point of view of guarantees of a fair trial, since the names of the warranted persons often become known only after death. And finally, “secret warrants” are a very convenient tool not only for imitation of intense activity (they’d say that the perpetrators were the people who had already died), but also for interference in the peace process. After all, we all know whose hands hold the “remote control” of this so-called Court.
Mr. President,
In his latest report, Mr. Khan again laments a lack of funds for handling the Libyan file. Then where did the tens of millions of dollars that Western countries recently contributed to the ICC go to? They have publicly stated that they wanted to pay for the illegal investigation in Ukraine. However, Mr. Khan assured everyone that this was not about paid-for justice and that the generous Western donations would allegedly go to all cases in the ICC basket. How then do you to explain the shortage on the Libyan track? I also wonder whether the US voluntary contribution to the ICC budget is being spent on the investigation of the situation in Palestine.
Mr. President,
Double standards and all-out politicization are not a unique feature of the Libyan file. They permeate the entire work of the ICC. Its continued inaction against the background of the tragedy unfolding in Gaza is particularly revealing. We underscore that the ICC has been preliminarily examining the situation in Palestine since 2015 and conducting a formal investigation since 2021. But for 9 years, it achieved nothing.
This being said, I wonder if the efficiency of the ICC at this track is in any way influenced by the fact that the two American political parties put forward a draft bill to the US Congress on sanctions against the ICC officials involved in investigating actions of both the United States and its allies. On April 29, the Speaker of the House of Representatives explicitly called on the US Administration to “immediately and unequivocally demand that the ICC stand down” and “use every available tool to prevent such an abomination.”
It should be recalled that recently Congressmen praised the ICC’s investigation of the situation in Ukraine and even hastily amended the legislation prohibiting cooperation with the ICC in order to be able to pay for the commissioned trial against Russia. Now they will probably have to tweak the legislation once again.
Mr. President,
Thus, we can see that the ICC is a political tool in the hands of the West. It does not contribute to reconciliation. On the contrary, it is actively hindering peace processes, trying to influence the participants in the interests of its Western masters. In other words, it is doing anything but implementing resolution 1970.
13 years of failure and imitation of engaged work on the situation in Libya are enough to convince us not only that the ICC is useless in resolving the Libyan crisis, but also that it is simply harmful. The Security Council should finally recognize that the referral of the Libyan file to the ICC was a mistake that must not be repeated and take the long overdue decision to withdraw it. That would ensure that the political process moves forward on the basis of a national consensus of all socio-political forces. That, in turn, would be more in line with the mandate of the Security Council than listening to the hollow reports of the Prosecutor’s Office of this puppet institution.
We are convinced that the effectiveness of the ICC should not be measured by the number of visits, meetings or offices it has opened. Nor will it be judged by Mr. Khan’s eloquence. The international community does not have another 14 years for the ICC to exercise its skill of standing aside, having failed to fulfil its goals.