THE International Criminal Court (ICC) is facing not a crisis of efficiency, but a crisis of meaning.
It was designed for a world that no longer exists.
That world assumed a minimal commitment by powerful States to multilateralism, territorial restraint and the idea that law could moderate brute force.
The world now emerging is one in which power is unapologetic, coercion is normalised and international law is tolerated only when it aligns with strategic interest.
In this environment, ICC risks becoming an artefact of a liberal moment that has passed.
United States’ Donald Trump’s presidency laid bare these shifts with unsettling clarity.
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His threats of military action against Venezuela, his casual pronouncements about acquiring Greenland as if it were negotiable property, and his broader contempt for multilateral institutions were not diplomatic accidents.
They reflected a worldview in which sovereignty is conditional and power authorises entitlement.
When such thinking emanates from a State that once styled itself as a guardian of the international order, it signals a deeper collapse of the normative foundations on which international criminal justice rests.
The implications for ICC are profound.
International criminal law presumes that territorial integrity matters, that aggression is exceptional and that grave violations invite
accountability.
Yet when powerful States openly threaten invasion, redraw boundaries in rhetoric or practice and deploy coercive force without multilateral authorisation, the distinction between lawful authority and criminal conduct becomes political rather than legal.
ICC cannot function coherently in a system where the definition of crime depends on who commits it.
This contradiction became even starker in the context of Venezuela.
The forcible capture and removal of a sitting foreign president by the United States, regardless of the criminal allegations advanced against him, raises a fundamental issue that international criminal justice cannot ignore.
The seizure of a head of State by another State, outside a UN Security Council framework, strikes at the heart of the prohibition on the use of force and the principle of sovereign equality.
If such conduct is normalised when undertaken by a powerful State, yet treated as criminal when undertaken by weaker ones, the crime of aggression becomes a selectively applied concept.
ICC, mandated to address precisely such violations, is rendered structurally irrelevant when those most capable of breaching the norm are beyond its jurisdiction.
For Africa and the global south, this reality confirms long-standing scepticism.
Many States were encouraged to embrace international criminal justice as part of post-conflict reconstruction and democratic consolidation.
Yet they have watched powerful States evade scrutiny while weaker ones are disciplined.
Trump’s explicit rejection of ICC did not invent this double standard; it exposed it.
What had long been practised discreetly was made unmistakably clear: international law constrains the periphery far more than the centre.
This has consequences beyond perception.
ICC’s authority rests not on force, but on legitimacy.
Once international justice is widely understood as selective, co-operation becomes strategic rather than principled.
Resistance to the court, particularly in Africa, should, therefore, be understood not as hostility to accountability, but as resistance to asymmetry.
A justice system that cannot meaningfully interrogate acts of aggression, coercive regime changes or extraterritorial enforcement by dominant powers cannot plausibly claim neutrality.
The deeper problem is structural.
ICC operates within a global order that privileges stability for the powerful over justice for the vulnerable.
The UN Security Council, with its veto system, functions as a political gatekeeper for accountability.
Atrocities in some regions are prosecuted with urgency, while others are insulated by strategic alliances.
In such a system, the court is asked to deliver justice without being allowed to confront those who destabilise the system most profoundly.
The existential question for ICC, therefore, is not whether it can secure more convictions, but whether it can survive in a world where law has been openly subordinated to power.
If international relations are reverting to spheres of influence, transactional sovereignty and coercive diplomacy, then a court premised on universal norms becomes structurally
marginal.
Yet abandoning ICC would be a mistake.
Even in its weakened state, the court remains a site of resistance against normalised impunity.
Its very limitations expose the hypocrisy of a global order that speaks the language of law while practising the politics of force.
The real danger lies not in ICC’s shortcomings, but in the growing willingness to accept that justice itself must yield to power.
The future of ICC will ultimately reflect the future of multilateralism itself.
Trump did not kill the rules-based order; he revealed its fragility.
Whether international criminal justice becomes a footnote in history or a foundation for renewal depends on whether states particularly in Africa and the global south can re-imagine accountability beyond selective global hierarchies.
Without that reckoning, ICC will remain what it increasingly appears to be: a court that judges the weak in a world governed by the strong.