Name: Why The ICC Is The World’s Biggest Joke
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T17:28:26.000Z
Duration: 48 min 48 s
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Never before in world history have there been so many sitting heads of state with active warrants for their arrest issued by the International Criminal Court or icc.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and

Participle clauses

Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhenzada of Afghanistan all have active warrants for their arrest over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity issued by the ICC, obliging all 125 member states who were party to the core to arrest these leaders if they ever stepped foot on their territory.

And soon, a fourth currently sitting head of state is likely to have an arrest warrant issued for him as well.

Acting President Minong Khlang of Myanmar, whose arrest warrant has already been requested by the ICC's chief prosecutor and will likely be formally issued shortly.

So let's get into how all of these leaders have found themselves in this position and how the hunt for all of their arrests have been progressing.

Establishing an international court to charge political leaders accused of committing international crimes was first proposed in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference following the First World War.

But no concrete steps towards actually setting one up came until after the end of the Second World War when the victorious Allied powers established two ad hoc criminal tribunals to prosecute the former leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for war crimes.

Karl Doenitz, the former chief of the German Naval High Command, who briefly served as Nazi Germany's head of state for about a month following Hitler's suicide, was technically the first former head of state to be formally charged by an international court for war crimes and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Three former Japanese prime ministers were also indicted for war crimes during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

Hideki Tojo, prime minister between 1941 and 1944, and

Koki Hirota, prime minister between 1936 and 1937, were both sentenced by the court to death, while Hironuma Kiichiro, who served as Japan's Prime Minister briefly for seven months in 1939, was sentenced to life in prison for a long time.

These were the only former heads of state to ever be formally charged with international crimes by an international court.

Because the onset of the Cold War, the global rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union, eliminated any prospect of further global cooperation on ever setting up another International Court.

In 1989, near the end of the Cold War, however, the then Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago brought up the idea of creating a permanent international criminal court again, and

in response, the UN General assembly initiated the process of drafting up a statute for one.

But in the meantime, while that work was still going on, two major global crises that involved the crime of genocide erupted in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, both of which were serious enough that the United Nations Security Council established two more ad hoc criminal tribunals for them that were the first ones of their kind established since the 1940s.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, or the ICTY, was established in 1993 and was tasked with prosecuting war crimes committed throughout the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

161 people would ultimately be indicted by this ad hoc court that included a wide range of people, from common foot soldiers to generals and even heads of state.

Very notably Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia and the Afar Yugoslavia at the time, became the very first sitting head of state to ever be indicted by an International Criminal Court for war crimes by the ICTY in 1999 during the Middle of the Kosovo war, where his leadership was alleged by the court to have been responsible for the killings of up to 9,000 Kosovar Albanian civilians, the destruction of entire villages, and

the forceful displacement of nearly a million Kosovar Albanians from their homes and out of the country in an attempt to ethnically cleans Kosovo and preserve Serbia's demographic hold over the territory.

Milosevic was eventually overthrown the next year by a revolution in 2000 and subsequently arrested by Yugoslav authorities and deported to the Netherlands to stand trial in front of the ICTY for his crimes, but

he died there in prison in 2006 while his trial was still ongoing.

Other former heads of state of partially recognized states who were also indicted by the ICTY included Milan Babic, the former president of the self declared Republic of Serbia, and

Craida in Croatia, who was indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2004 and sentenced to 13 years in prison along with Radovan Karzyk, the former president of the self declared Bosnian Serb Republika Srpska in Bosnia, who remained a wanted fugitive for years until he was eventually caught and arrested in Serbia in 2008 and extradited to the Netherlands to stand trial.

Karadzic notably was found guilty of the crime of genocide for the events that took place in Sebrenica in 1995 where the Bosnian Serb army systematically massacred more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys over just a few days, which the ICTY later legally defined as the first genocide to have taken place in Europe since the Second World War.

Karadzyk was eventually sentenced by the court to 40 years in prison for his role in the massacre in 2016, which he attempted to appeal, which was rejected and led to his sentence being escalated to life in prison instead.

The United Nations Security Council also established another ad hoc criminal tribunal for Rwanda in 1994 that investigated genocide allegations committed there during the 100 day period between April and July of that year, where a radical Hutu extremist regime in power systematically annihilated more than a million people in the country, including up to 800,000 ethnic Tutsis who were the regime's primary targets.

The highest ranking Hutu government official that was captured and charged by this ad hoc criminal tribunal was John Kambanda, who who had served as Rwanda's Prime Minister and head of state for the entirety of the 100 days, where an almost unbelievable 1 million people were killed, overseeing the entirety of the regime's campaign of annihilation against the Tutsis once he was overthrown in July of 1994.

Khambanda initially fled the country, but

he was caught and apprehended three years later in 1997 in Kenya and extradited to stand trial.

He notably became the first and so far only former head of state to actually plead guilty to the criminal charge of genocide, for which he was sentenced to life in prison in 1998, where he's remained ever since.

The horrors that took place in the former Yugoslavia and rwanda during the 1990s highlighted to many the pressing need to finally establish a permanent International Criminal Court to handle these kind of things in the future.

And so finally, in 1998, the UN General assembly held a conference in Rome that finalized the treaty that created the International Criminal Court by a vote of 127, with the seven countries who voted against its adoption at the time being China, the United States, Israel, Saddam's Iraq, Gaddafi's Libya, Qatar and Yemen.

Notably, Israel very publicly voted against the adoption of the ICC because it included in its list of prosecutable war crimes the action of transferring population into occupied territory, which Israel at that time was already actively doing in the occupied west bank in Gaza.

Regardless, the UN General assembly voted to endorse the ICC in both 1999 and then again in 2000.

And so the ICC finally legally entered into force in the summer of 2002.

It should be noted at this point that the ICC is a distinct organization from the International Court of Justice, or the icj, which hears and judges on disputes between states.

By contrast, the ICC is the first and only permanent international court that has jurisdiction to prosecute individual people for International crimes like genocide, war crimes, crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.

As of the end of 2024, 125 UN member states have joined with the ICC and formally recognized the Court's authority.

Although a number of very important countries have never joined and have never recognized the court, including the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and virtually all of the Arab world.

The ICC began issuing out their first arrest warrants a few years later in 2005.

But the first time that the Court issued an arrest warrant for an actual sitting head of state wouldn't come until 2009 when the court decided to indict Sudan's then sitting President, Omar Al Bashir for more crimes he was allegedly responsible for in Darfur.

Darfur is a large region in Western Sudan that is highly ethnically diverse with large populations of Sudanese Arabs who are largely nomadic and indigenous, largely settled sub Saharan African people like the Fur, Masalit and Sagawa people.

In 2003, armed militant rebel factions in Darfur, composed of the sub Saharan minority groups, rose up in a rebellion across the region against the Sudanese government, accusing it of long standing policies of oppressing the non Arab population in Darfur.

The Sudanese government responded to this rebellion with a crackdown in Darfur and began arming and supporting local Arab militias in the region that came to be called the Janjaweed to suppress the non Arab rebels.

Catastrophic levels of violence ensued in Darfur and it's been estimated by the UN that over just the next two years between two in 2005, around 200,000 people were killed in Darfur, with the overwhelming majority perpetrated by the state sponsored Janjaweed militias.

All of this is what resulted in the ICC deciding to formally indict Sudan's President Omar Al Bashir with charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2009, followed by another separate warrant issued in 2010 that charged Al Bashir with genocide in Darfur as well, making Al Bashir the first sitting head of state to ever be charged by an international court with the crime of genocide.

What followed was years and years of drama and controversy.

Omar Al Bashir himself insisted that fewer than 10,000 people were actually killed in Darfur during the conflict and that the UN and the US and other countries had grossly exaggerated the death toll in order to smear him.

As the conflict in Darfur was still ongoing, the US government formally declared that the Janjaweed and the Sudanese government were guilty of committing genocide there in 2004.

But to date, the US government is the only government in the world that has ever taken that position.

The UN took the position that while the Janjaweed carried out mass murder and multiple war crimes in Darfur, no systematic genocide took place there.

The African Union adopted a similar position, while Doctors Without Borders, one of the world's largest NGOs, argued that calling the events in Darfur a genocide was inappropriate, arguing that while mass killings did happen, there was never any systematic targeting of one ethnic group over another one.

Nonetheless, the ICC's chief prosecutor accused Al Bashir of bearing personal criminal responsibility for the crime of genocide in Darfur with the intent to destroy the territory's three main sub Saharan African groups, which was supported by the United States, NATO and Amnesty International.

But several other countries and organizations around the world condemned the warrants for Al Bashir and accused them of being politically motivated by the West.

The African Union, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation all condemned the ICC arrest warrants for Al Bashir, while they and Al Bashir himself accused the ICC of having a pro Western bias, indicting him for crimes that took place in Darfur while ignoring crimes that took place during the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya for nearly 40 years by this point, even went so far as to label the ICC's warrant for Al Bashir as an act of terrorism.

And as fate would have it, Gaddafi himself shortly ended up becoming the second sitting head of state to have an arrest warrant issued for him by the ICC in 2011 over his harsh response to the Libyan revolution against his government that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths in the country.

The ICC issued an arrest warrant for him in June of 2011 over alleged war crimes he was responsible for committing in Libya against his own people.

But he was overthrown, captured and brutally murdered by the Libyan rebels just a few months later in October, which led to the arrest warrant being quickly terminated before it could ever be executed.

The ICC's decision to issue another warrant for Gaddafi's arrest only further enraged the communities in Africa and the Arab world, though in 2013, multiple African countries began accusing the ICC of bias and racism.

Because up until that point, since the court's establishment 11 years previously in 2002, they'd only ever indicted suspects in Africa alone and literally nowhere else, leading to further accusations that the court was simply ignoring crimes committed by Western leaders.

The first time that the ICC would ever indict people for crimes outside of Africa wouldn't happen all the way up until 2020.

Two, 20 years after the court's initial establishment, when they indicted three men from the breakaway, partially recognized state of South Ossetia for alleged war crimes relating to their treatments of ethnically Georgian civilians during the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.

Meanwhile, Omar Al Bashir continued remaining the President of Sudan for another decade after his arrest warrant was issued by the ICC in 2009, and

he technically continues to remain a wanted fugitive by the court to this very day.

Sudan has never been a member of the ICC and has never recognized the court's authority, so the country would never just depose their own president and extradite him to the Netherlands to stand trial.

But Al Bashir also kept continually taking international visits abroad, while he had multiple active arrest warrants issued for him as well, which led to a lot of very significant controversy.

After the arrest warrants were issued for him, including for genocide.

In Darfur, Al Bashir took official state visits to China, Russia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and

the United Arab Emirates, none of which were members of the ICC either, and

so made no attempts to arrest him while he was there.

But he also visited many other countries that actually were members of the ICC too, including Chad, Nigeria, Jordan, Kenya, South Africa and Djibouti, all of whom refused to perform their duties as members of the ICC by having him arrested while he was present on their territory, which severely undermined the ICC's legitimacy.

After he visited Kenya in 2011, the government simply declared that he'd be arrested if he ever visited Kenya again in the future.

The situation of his frequent flaunting visits to ICC member states across Africa and their consistent refusals to ever arrest him frustrated the ICC so much that they eventually declared that they could have his presidential plane intercepted by fighter jets while it was flying over international airspace and escorted away, which then led to Al Bashir always flying in his plane with his own fighter jet escorts to prevent that from ever happening.

Al Bashir was eventually overthrown by a military coup d' etat in Sudan in 2019, after 30 continuous years in power.

And although the new Sudanese government that replaced him initially promised to extradite him to stand trial before the icc, that still hasn't happened yet.

Six years later, Al Bashir was convicted of corruption in Sudanese courts in 2019 and imprisoned shortly after he was overthrown, where he's remained ever since, he is currently 81 years old and still wanted by the ICC to stand trial for war crimes and genocide that he is allegedly responsible for.

That took place in Darfur between 2003 and 2005, and

this leads us up to the third sitting head of state that the ICC would eventually issue an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin of Russia in 2023.

Putin has dominated Russian politics for the entirety of the 21st century.

Except for a brief stint as the country's prime minister between 2008 and 2012, Putin has continually served as Russia's president and head of state ever since 2000.

Putin led Russia into multiple wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria.

But it was Putin's biggest war in Ukraine that earned him the arrest warrant by the ICC.

After ordering limited invasions of Ukraine in 2014 that resulted in Russia seizing Crimea and pro Russian separatists taking over a swath of territory in the Donbas region, Putin ordered a full scale invasion of Ukraine that was launched in early 2022.

Since then, Russian forces have occupied roughly 20% of Ukraine's internationally recognized territory and have unilaterally declared to have annexed five of Ukraine's provinces.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have likely been killed as a result of the war, and

there have been multiple instances of severe war crimes committed all throughout it.

For the alleged war crime of intentionally directing military attacks against civilian targets in Ukraine, the ICC issued arrest warrants for many high ranking Russian military officers, including Viktor Sokolov, the former commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, who may have already been killed during a Ukrainian missile Sergei Kobylosh, the commander of the Russian Air Force Sergei Shoigu, the former Russian defense minister between 2012 and 2024 and Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and the Supreme Commander of all Russian forces in Ukraine.

But Putin himself wasn't issued an arrest warrant by the ICC for any of these war crimes.

Instead, Putin's ICC arrest warrant was issued over his alleged responsibility in the mass deportations of potentially tens to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children away from the Russian occupied territories into Russia itself, with a dual arrest warrant issued for the same charge to his Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia, Maria Lvova Belova.

It's not entirely clear how many children from Ukraine that Russia has deported from the territories it's occupied, and

the estimates are pretty much all over the place.

A minimum of 19,500 Ukrainian children who have been deported into Russia since the invasion began have been firmly identified by name by Yale University.

While estimates for the true numbers of children taken range up to more than 100,000 and even more than 240,000 by other sources, it's been theorized that Russian forces have been taking so many children from Ukraine in order to erase their identities and to raise them as Russians instead.

In an attempt to bolster Russia's own catastrophic birth rates and their ongoing casualties in Ukraine, the return of all these missing children has since become a central component of Ukraine's demands for peace in the war.

But to date, only a handful of them have actually ever been returned, around 1300 across several deals that were brokered by the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the Vatican.

As you can imagine, these alleged mass deportations of potentially hundreds of thousands of children away from Ukraine violate multiple international laws and constitute serious war crimes, potentially even including genocide.