The Argentine prosecutor has dispatched his deputy Fatou Bensouda of the Gambia for the event – and is also scheduled to hold talks with the other Heads of Governments who will be in Kigali for the same function.
Moreno-Ocampo authorized the visit in the hopes of using it to press African leaders to support the court’s efforts to hold indicted Sudanese leader Omar El Bashir and other alleged criminals accountable.
Top among the leaders the ICC delegation is likely to meet is Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki who invited President Bashir to Nairobi last week as the country promulgated a new constitution. Kenya has come under severe international criticism for not arresting Bashir.
“We will meet some African heads of state in Kigali and discuss how to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur,” Moreno-Ocampo said in a statement. “There is no solution in Darfur without the involvement of African leaders.”
The ICC has been facing intense opposition from African leaders, who have complained that the tribunal has focused primarily on African crimes, carrying out investigations in Congo, Sudan, Uganda, and Central African Republic and now preparing a new probe into Kenyan violations.
President Kagame remains the fiercest critic of the court, and Rwanda is not a signatory to the statute which set it up.
The move to send a delegation to Kigali has drawn criticism from some of the court’s most passionate defenders, who say that deputy prosecutor’s appearance sends the wrong signal to Congolese victims of alleged Rwandan crimes and to Darfuri civilians who will face dire conditions if Rwanda carries through on its threat to withdraw 3,500 U.N. peacekeepers from Darfur to protest the U.N. report.
“It’s a bad decision,” Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, one of the court’s leading defenders, told Foreign Policy magazine. “This is not about guilt or innocence, which only a court could decide. It’s about association and perception.”
Bill Pace, a lawyer who oversees the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, an association of more than 2.500 pro-ICC NGOs, also told Foreign Policy that “it’s fine” for Fatou to attend the inauguration if she uses her visit to press Rwanda — which is not a member of the court — to support the ICC.
In July, an African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda, decided that “African Union member states shall not cooperate with the ICC in the arrest and surrender of the president of Sudan.” It also rejected a request by Moreno-Ocampo to set up a liaison office with the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to help improve cooperation and understanding of the court’s mandate.