Whitewashing failure: The ICC and the EU’s Sakharov Prize
The European Union has awarded the 2026 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought collectively to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its officials. The prize was established in 1988 and is named after Soviet-era physicist and political dissident Andrei Sakharov, a true hero of freedom. It is awarded annually by the European Parliament to individuals or organisations in recognition of their work in the defence of human and fundamental rights, in particular freedom of expression; the development of democracy; the safeguarding of minority rights; respect for international law and the defence of the rule of law. The Sakharov Prize is presented as being the highest tribute paid by the European Union to human rights work.
Announcing the 2026 laureate, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola declared: “The European Union is built on respect for multilateralism and international institutions. With the award of the Sakharov prize to the International Criminal Court and its officials, the European Parliament recognises the Court’s important work in upholding international law and justice.” The award ceremony will take place in December in Strasbourg, during the Parliament’s plenary session.
The European Parliament proclaimed that “The International Criminal Court investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. The Court is a crucial actor in the global fight to end impunity, and through international criminal justice, it aims to hold those responsible accountable for their crimes and to help prevent these crimes from happening again. As a court of last resort, it seeks to complement national courts. Governed by an international treaty called the Rome Statute, the ICC is the world’s first permanent international criminal court. The award highlights the ICC’s work, including investigations, prosecutions, trials and the issuance or authorisation of arrest warrants.”
It is important here to differentiate between fantasy and reality. The International Criminal Court is a permanent international organisation established by a multilateral treaty, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, signed in July 1998, with the Court coming into existence on 1 July 2002, following ratification by sixty states. On paper, the Court exists to prosecute genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression by individuals within member states should those crimes not be prosecuted by signatory governments. It was promised to be a court of last resort.
This self-proclaimed international court has been in existence for almost 25 years. The reality is that the Court is the child of the European Union and European non-governmental organisations by way of political in vitro fertilisation or adoption. The EU and its helot states overwhelmingly fund and direct the ICC, using it as an instrument of European foreign policy, hitherto mainly in Africa.
This award has clearly been a knee-jerk reaction by the European Union to the new sanctions imposed upon its legal love-child by the Trump administration. These sanctions have built upon measures introduced by President Trump in February 2025 by way of an Executive Order which declared the ICC to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. The United States never joined the Court, warning that any such court would inevitably seek to become a court of first instance and also seek to impose its jurisdiction upon non-signatory states. And this is exactly what the ICC has sought to do. Despite the fact that the United States and Israel are not signatories to the Rome Treaty, the ICC has nonetheless issued indictments for Israeli politicians and had previously sought to begin proceedings against American service personnel regarding alleged actions in Afghanistan. The Americans have finally lost patience with the ICC, hence the sanctions.
Broader criticisms of the Court reveal how far the ICC has drifted away from what was once gushingly expected of it. Every one of the reasons cited above by the European Parliament as grounds for awarding the Sakharov Prize to the ICC is questionable where not simply false. Far from trying individuals charged with the “gravest crimes of concerns to the international community”, it has instead found time to prosecute someone for destroying a mausoleum and other low-level regional politicians and militia leaders in Africa. Far from ending impunity, the Court has entrenched it by turning a blind eye to its European state funders accused of war crimes within the Global South and allowing immunity from prosecution, for example, for Global North military forces involved in the Libyan conflict in 2011. The Court has also demonstrably failed to deter war crimes and crimes against humanity. Far from safeguarding minorities the Court has overwhelming focused upon on a racial minority (of which more later).
It has also proved to be a travesty of a court. Its founders admit the Rome Statute is “seriously flawed”. The ICC’s judges and prosecutors are the result of corrupt vote-rigging, known in politer circles as “vote-trading”, amongst its signatory states, something even its supporters concede produces mediocrity not excellence. Some judges have had no legal qualifications or courtroom experience whatsoever. The Court’s supporters also admit that the three Prosecutors to date “have failed to be of high moral character” as mandated by the Rome Statute, with the last Prosecutor removed by the ICC’s governing body for sexual misconduct. The pro-ICC Economist has described ICC prosecutions as “bumbling,” “chaotic” and “near-farcical.” The New York Times reported that many legal experts agree that key ICC legal cases have “degenerated into something more resembling a circus, if not an outright farce.” Sympathetic legal bloggers have described its proceedings as “slapstick comedy.”
Indictments of the Court go on and on. Amnesty International has noted the ICC’s “questionable credibility,” subsequently warning that “the court’s legitimacy risks being eroded by an increasingly selective approach to justice.” In 2023, Human Rights Watch warned of “concerns of politicization of the court’s work” and noted its “legitimacy challenges.” Similarly, ICC-friendly international law experts have said the following of key ICC decisions: “spectacular failures,” “fiasco,” “obvious shortcomings,” “deeply misguided . . . very dangerous and unwise,” “confusing,” a “mess” and the “worst possible solution,” with ICC prosecutors said to be “poorly prepared,” “angry, threatening” and “autocratic” with a “coercive or dictatorial management style” and a “recurring pattern of evidentiary problems.”
In addition to being simply unfit for purpose, the ICC has shown itself to be a racist court to boot. The Court’s close identification with anti-African racism and European neo-colonialism is excruciatingly ironic given that previous laureates have included African leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Denis Mukwege.
Writing in 2024, Amnesty International pointed out that the ICC had “focused” its prosecutorial lens “almost exclusively on Africa since it began operating in 2002.” The conservative American legal scholar Professor Jeremy Rabkin notes that “Africans have reason to be wary”, and on the political left Professor Rachel López, an American expert in public international law, has pointed out that the ICC has broken the Court’s own anti-racism policy in that the Rome Statute itself requires the ICC to follow and apply the law “consistent with internationally recognized human rights and be without any adverse distinction founded on grounds such as [inter alia] race.” The fact that the Court has only ever convicted black Africans in its quarter-century of existence and that it issued its first non-African arrest warrants in June 2022 strongly support her case. Professor López observes further that “the ICC builds on a long history of criminalizing Blackness . . . Since the ICC supposedly prosecutes only ‘the most serious crimes of international concern,’ these convictions express the not-so-subtle suggestion that the ‘worst of the worst’ criminals on the planet are Black men.” Lopez adds that “the geographic focus of such analyses obfuscates a starker, uncomfortable truth: all those charged and convicted by the court have been Black or Brown and not one has been White.” Respected Yale University law professor Rebecca Hamilton is equally blunt about the ICC: “One of the defining narratives of the Court’s first 15 years of operation has been that it has an anti-Africa bias.”
The African Union has labelled the ICC a “neo-colonial court”. In 2016 President Kenyatta also kicked back: “Africa is not a third-rate territory of second-class peoples, we are not a project, or experiment of outsiders.” African Union leaders have accused the court of “racist hypocrisy” and “double standards.” Rwandan President Paul Kagame stated that the ICC reflected “colonialism, slavery and imperialism.” An Ethiopian prime minister accused the ICC of “hunting Africans” because of their race. African discontent culminated at the January 2017 African Union heads of state summit in Addis Ababa, when the AU called for the mass withdrawal of its member states from the ICC.
In case an apologist for the ICC claims that these African claims might be self-serving, the ICC’s racial profiling of black Africans has also been confirmed by a Vice-President of the Court, French ICC Judge Marc Perrin de Brichambaut. On 17 May 2017, de Brichambaut gave a talk at Beijing Law School in which he candidly stated that European countries were “paying the bills for the ICC” and described African states as “a group of 54 countries who provide the suspects and the accused” for the Court. Had a judge in the United Kingdom said that white people paid for his court and black people provided the suspects, that judge would have been summarily sacked. Not so with Judge de Brichambaut. He was promoted.icc
The reality is that far from “upholding international law and justice” as claimed by its European enablers, the ICC, with its bogus judges, bumbling prosecutors and blatant selectivity, has been disastrous for international justice. The European Union is scrambling about trying to protect its two billion dollar investment in what has come to be seen as a discredited, shambolic, racist body. Awarding it the Sakharov Prize is a grotesque insult to the memory of a great man.
