The honest answer is not the one that gets applause. The bias is real — but it isn't in the courtroom. It's in the architecture.
Since the International Criminal Court began work in 2002, it has secured a handful of convictions. Every one of them is of a person from an African situation. Nine of its first ten investigations were African. And in September 2025, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger withdrew from the court altogether, calling it "a tool of neocolonial repression."
So the question asks itself: is the International Criminal Court biased against Africa?
There is an easy answer here, and it is satisfying, and it gets applause. This essay is not going to give it to you — not because the underlying problem isn't real, but because the easy answer points at the wrong target. Let us build the case for bias as strongly as it deserves, then the case against it just as honestly, and then find out where the bias actually lives. It is not where most people assume.
The case for bias
Every person the ICC has convicted comes from an African situation. Not most — all.
Now consider who cannot be touched. The United States is not a member of the court. Neither is China, Israel, India, Turkey, or Russia. Under the Rome Statute, non-members are, as a matter of law, outside the court's reach. The world's most powerful states wrote themselves out of the jurisdiction.
The UN Security Council can refer any situation to the court, even involving non-members. It has done so twice: Darfur and Libya. Both African. It has never referred Israel. It has never referred Syria. When the court examined British forces in Iraq, it closed the file in 2020 without charges.
This is not a fringe complaint. The African Union has called the pattern selective justice. Paul Kagame said the court was built to prosecute Africans and other poor countries. Desmond Tutu refused to share a stage with Tony Blair over Iraq. Serious people have made this case on the strength of a real record.
So — case closed? Not quite, because there is a question almost nobody making that argument stops to ask.
Who actually called the court?
How did those African cases reach The Hague in the first place?
The ICC opens a case in one of three ways: a state refers itself, the Security Council refers a situation, or the prosecutor acts independently. The Democratic Republic of Congo — self-referral. Uganda — self-referral. Mali — self-referral, in 2012, the same Mali that would later withdraw calling the court neocolonial. The Central African Republic — self-referral, twice. Côte d'Ivoire accepted the court's jurisdiction voluntarily. Of all African situations before the court, only Kenya and Burundi were opened by the prosecutor acting alone.
Africa did not simply use this court. Africa helped build it. African states were central to its founding in the 1990s; thirty-four of fifty-four African countries are parties to the Rome Statute — the largest regional bloc in the court's membership. On the two Security Council referrals, African members either voted in favour or abstained. None voted against.
A European court hunting Africans is difficult to square with the fact that most African cases arrived because African governments sent them there.
Whose voice is this?
Here the honest part becomes necessary. Listen to who makes the bias argument loudest: overwhelmingly, political elites — heads of state, ministers, and very often men facing charges themselves, or fearing they might. The anti-ICC campaign did not catch fire when the court indicted a militia leader for conscripting child soldiers. It caught fire in 2009, with a warrant for a sitting president, Omar al-Bashir, and burned hottest when it reached Kenya's leadership.
Listen for a different voice: the victims. Researchers who have gone and asked — Chatham House among them — find that victims of these atrocities are almost universally relieved that someone, anyone, was finally paying attention. Consider who is actually in the dock: warlords, militia commanders, men who conscripted children and ordered mass rape.
There is a version of the anti-ICC argument that sounds anti-colonial and functions as impunity — where "stop prosecuting Africans" means, in practice, "let these particular Africans go," and the people who pay for that are other Africans: the dead ones, the ones in the camps. The demand to protect sovereignty and the demand to protect victims are not always the same demand, and when a president facing a warrant wraps himself in the language of anti-imperialism, that deserves notice.
Does this settle it? No — because the original complaint remains true. The powerful really are untouched. Which means we have been asking the wrong question. Not is the prosecutor biased against Africans, but why can't this court touch anybody powerful?
Where the bias actually lives
The bias is real, but it is not in the courtroom. It is in the architecture — two locks on the door.
The first is membership. Non-parties to the Rome Statute are outside jurisdiction entirely. The United States, China, Israel, India, Russia, and Turkey did not beat the charges; they made themselves uncharge-able by declining to sign.
The second is the veto. The only route to a non-member is a Security Council referral, and the Council's five permanent members can shield themselves and their clients. Israel is protected. Syria was protected. Any state with a powerful patron is protected.
Run the logic: the powerful are immune by law, their allies immune by veto, and what remains inside the net is weaker states, poorer states, and a continent that, in good faith, joined the court and asked it for help. The ICC did not go hunting for Africa. Africa is what was left inside the net — the same architecture found in asking who controls the global economy. Not a villain. A design.
The receipt
Watch what happened when the court finally tried to reach upward. In 2023, an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin — the first ever for the head of state of a permanent Security Council member. In 2024, warrants in the Israel–Gaza situation, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, alongside Hamas leaders. In 2025, warrants for Taliban leaders over the persecution of Afghan women and girls. None African. The court, at last, was reaching upward.
The response: in February 2025, the United States — not even a member — signed an executive order authorising sanctions against the court itself. By December, eleven ICC officials had been sanctioned — not defendants, but judges and prosecutors, their assets frozen and travel restricted. Russia placed ICC officials on a wanted list and sentenced judges in absentia.
The moment this court aimed at the powerful, the powerful did not stand trial. They attacked the court. The powerful were never unprosecuted because they were innocent. They are unprosecuted because they can punish anyone who tries — an option no African defendant ever had.
So what do we actually demand?
If the problem is that the powerful escape justice, the answer cannot be less justice. Walking out of the court does not touch the American veto, and it does not inconvenience a single powerful man; it protects only those who were already going to be indicted.
The answer is more justice for everyone: demand that the powerful be reachable, not that the weak be released. Close the immunity gap. Push, as African jurists have for years, to strip the Security Council's grip on referrals.
And pursue the deeper solution Kofi Annan named: complementarity. The ICC is a court of last resort, stepping in only when national systems cannot or will not act. The truest answer to "why are Africans always tried in The Hague" is to build African courts strong enough that no one need go to The Hague again. Justice at home is the real sovereignty — not immunity, but capacity.
The mirror
So — is the ICC biased against Africa? The pattern is real and indefensible, but the bias is not in the judges. It is in the blueprint. The court is not a hunter; it is a mirror, reflecting precisely who, in this world, can be judged and who cannot.
An all-African docket is not proof that Africans are uniquely criminal. It is proof that everyone else got themselves excused.
The question was never really about a court in The Hague. It is whether we are willing to build a world where power does not come with an exit. The day a court there can put anyone in the dock — anyone — Africa will not be the one afraid of it.
This essay is part of Tamu Academy — an AfroCentric learning space exploring mental health, policy, global affairs, and the environment through African ways of knowing. Watch the video version on the Voices of Change channel.