South Africa to pull out of International Criminal Court

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party said Sunday it has told President Jacob Zuma’s government to withdraw South Africa’s membership from the worldwide Criminal Court (ICC).

“The NGC has just resolved that South Africa should withdraw from the global Criminal Court”, he told reporters.

The governing African National Council (ANC) accused the ICC of losing its direction and that it was an imperialist court.

South Africa and the ICC are at loggerheads after the government failed to abide by an ICC warrant to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he was attending an African Union (AU) summit in Johannesburg in mid-June this year.

President Bashir has spent the last half a decade looking over his shoulder, avoiding countries he deemed risky and only visiting African countries he saw as friendly due to their hostile stance against the ICC.

South Africa and other African governments have accused the ICC of showing anti-African and pro-Western bias.

Bapela said that powerful nations “trample” human rights and pursue “selfish interests”.

The decision was announced by Obed Bapela during a party policy meeting.

The United States is one of the countries that is not a member of the ICC.

The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) had issued a statement condemning al-Bashir’s departure from South Africa, saying that the ANC government could “no longer hide behind flimsy excuses”.

“South Africa nonetheless contains standard of prescreen, we’re not…”

The ANC said it still believed in the founding principles of the ICC, such as prevention of genocide and stopping the violations of human rights, and that such principles led the country to become a signatory to the Rome Statute that governs the court.

The plan will also be submitted to the ICC’s assembly of states next month and to the African Union’s next summit in January, party leaders said.

According to the NGC’s discussion documents, the ANC takes the following view: “We perceive it as tending to act as a proxy instrument for these states, which see no need to subject themselves to its discipline, but will persecute African leaders and effect regime change on the continent”.