“Protocol on Amendments to the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights.”
John Bart Gerald
On June 30th the African Union summit meeting at Equatorial Guinea voted the “Protocol on Amendments to the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights.” It maintains that while in power, African leaders and “senior officials” are not subject to prosecution for genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. In principle the Protocol mirrors the judicial realities of Canada and the U.S. which assure our heads of state immunity, but less overtly.
Africans are creating an African Court as an alternative to NATO’s International Criminal Court which has chosen African leaders to call to account. So to grant their heads of state immunity to charges of genocide is a defensive measure objecting to a post-colonial assertion of European and American controls. This Protocol is protested by International NGO’s, and strongly by Amnesty International which has since its inception in 1961 applied our moral precepts to countries which have rejected the empire’s direct colonial rule.
In Canada and the U.S. the leaders make themselves invulnerable to charges of genocide, through manipulation of the legal system and perception management of the public. U.S. Reservations at ratifying the Convention on Genocide suggest the U.S. will decide whether charges of genocide can be applied to the U.S.. Under Canadian law the Minister of Justice’s approval is required before the head of state (who appoints the Minister of Justice) can be charged.
In both countries, the political and judicial institutions necessary to pursue charges of genocide against top officials are so deeply part of a genocidal matrix no charges have successfully been laid through the wars and destruction of the Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, — violating the Convention’s prohibition against destruction of a national group. In Canada policies furthering the destruction of aboriginal peoples seem unstoppable by legal means. U.S. policies supporting the massacres of indigenous people in Guatemala among other Central and South American countries, and the support for Israel of both countries shows at least a complicity in genocide.
Is it that African leaders are more honest than the political leaders of Euro-American countries ? While not challenging the U.N. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” African countries are attempting to protect the continuity of their own governance through a time when powerful NATO countries have politicized the use of the Genocide Convention beyond a primary concern for justice. Prosecutions by the International Criminal Court too often assert punishment of African leaders opposing Euro-American policies.