SA asked to appear before ICC over al-Bashir’s escape in 2015

The South African government has reportedly been asked to appear at the International Criminal Court (ICC) next month to account for its failure to arrest Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir during a visit to the country two years ago.

Reuters reports that the acting chief state law adviser on Wednesday said the government has been asked to appear before the court at The Hague in the Netherlands on April 7.

Following last month’s ruling by the North Gauteng High Court which found the country’s withdrawal from the international tribunal unconstitutional, on Tuesday night government informed the United Nations (UN) that it was revoking its intention to withdraw itself as a signatory to the ICC founding treaty, the Rome Statute.

The application was brought by the Democratic Alliance (DA), which argued that only Parliament, through a vote, had the power to withdraw the country from the ICC. The administrative arm of the state could not do it alone.

The same high court handed down a judgment in 2015 declaring that government was bound by international law to arrest the Sudanese leader for the war crimes he was charged with by the ICC. Al-Bashir was in South Africa attending an African Union (AU) summit, but was not arrested and actually assisted by South African authorities to escape from a military air force base.

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