African exodus from the ICC

Writing for the World Politics Review, Julian Hattem writes:

Africa’s long-simmering tensions with the International Criminal Court appear to be boiling over. After years of allegations that the ICC has focused solely on the African continent, while letting abuses in other parts of the world go unpunished, three countries are now preparing to withdraw from the statute authorizing the court. Burundi began the process to leave the court last month, followed in quick succession by South Africa and, last week, Gambia…

To date, all but one of the 10 investigations opened by the court have involved cases in Africa. Every single one of the 39 people indicted by the ICC is African.

The article goes on to explain that there are good reasons for these results:

Defenders of the court have noted that it is only able to investigate cases based on referrals from the United Nations Security Council or within countries that are a party to it. Many of the cases in Africa were opened because leaders there explicitly asked for its intervention…

The ICC has opened preliminary investigations in multiple countries outside of Africa, including Venezuela and South Korea, though it has not handed down charges in those cases. Possible investigations into Syria, North Korea or other countries where human rights violations appear obvious have been impossible because the countries aren’t party to the ICC and have powerful allies with veto powers on the Security Council, namely Russia and China.

Reading this report, one can’t help but be reminded of the racial gap in school discipline in the US – and how Obama has tried to address it. Black students are far more likely to face discipline than are white/Asian students. Since, according to The Narrative, all such disparities must be due to racism by whites, government bean-counters now scrutinize school discipline statistics by race. Teachers, being aware of this, will act accordingly – and, presumably, will discipline white/Asian students more readily than black students.

The result? White students learn that they must be very careful to behave themselves. Meanwhile, black students learn that they can get away with much more*.

And then what happens? Black students become even more unruly, while white/Asian students become even more well-behaved. People notice this, and the result is… (I’ll let you guess).

School discipline and the ICC in Africa. They look very similar to me.

* A couple of days ago, while waiting for a train, I saw a black “yoof” smoking in an area that was clearly marked as a non-smoking area. He was spewing obscenities as he listened to his rap, and spitting. I couldn’t help but think, “if this were a white person, people would have said something to him by now. But as it stands, folks fear wild animals.”