The Quasi-Supranational AU and the International Criminal Court

Abstract

The Eurocentric inclinations of international law that lie at the core of its foundations have become a deliberate target of the quasi-supranational African Union (AU) that, unlike its predecessor, the Organisation of African Union (OAU), regards non-compliance with a perceived discriminatory international legal system as a duty. International law’s perceived historic inferiorization of African situations from slavery, colonialism, economic structural adjustment projects sponsored by Bretton Woods institutions, among others, collectively appear to be the main basis of the reactionary attitude of the AU to the International Criminal Court – one of international law’s youngest and most powerful institutions. African Member States Parties of the ICC appear to be asserting that an international legal order that maintains a disdainful look at Africa while its strictures may be under scot-free attack elsewhere is no longer sustainable. By modernizing and transforming their regional organization around the same time that the ICC came into force, discarding the OAU and replacing it with the quasi-supranational AU, African states appear to have been quietly and deliberately readying themselves for the next phase in their own approach to international relations, namely, one that challenges inferiorization of African situations by insisting on the UN value of equality of sovereign independent states.