Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics by Phil Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 379 pp., £26.99 (pbk))
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12214 |
| Author | Sara Dezalay |
DISTANT JUSTICE: THE IMPACT OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL
COURT ON AFRICAN POLITICS by PHIL CLARK
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 379 pp., £26.99 (pbk))
Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the
country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he
cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks
if he will be allowed to come in later on. ‘It is possible,’ says the gatekeeper,
‘but not now.’ At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and
the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through
the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says:
‘If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am
powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room
stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other.’1
The conclusion of Kafka’s celebrated parable ‘Before the Law’ is all too well
known: the country man dies without ever gaining access to the law. It also
provides an apt background to Phil Clark’s Distant Justice. The book’s intent
is to assess critically the politics of the International Criminal Court (ICC),
focusing specifically on the cases of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC) and providing broader insights on the African continent. Read
in the context of the deep – and apparently intractable – crisis of a Court that
stands accused of bias against the African continent, this book is particularly
timely. The ICC was established in 1998 as the first permanent global court
tasked with prosecuting the most egregious crimes worldwide – genocide,
crimes against humanity, crimes of war, and (since 2010) aggression. As
such, it was celebrated as the revival of a ‘Nuremberg legacy’ left dormant
throughout the Cold War. Yet the Court’s decision to acquit former Ivory
Coast President Laurent Gbagbo in January 2019 came at the tail-end of a
series of failed cases – a failure rate that stands unprecedented in the global
justice landscape.2In a context of wider contests against the Court – from the
US but also from states originally favorable to it, starting with African states
themselves – without the support of African states, indeed, it seems the very
existence of the ICC stands in the dock.
Clark’s conclusions are bleak. He traces the ICC’s failures in Africa to
one core dynamic: distance. The physical, institutional, and demographic
distance of the Court ‘from the African societies in which it intervenes has
been damaging, both to the Court and to local politics’ (p. 17). In keeping
with his long-established and prolific research on peace, truth, justice, and
reconciliation across various parts of the African continent as a Professor of
1 F. Kafka, ‘Before the Law’ (1915) trans. I. Johnston <https://www.kafka-online.info/
before-the-law.html>.
2 Since 2002, the ICC has pronounced only three convictions, including one overturned
on appeal. Eleven proceedings have failed out of a total of 22 completed cases since
2002. Four accused have been acquitted. Four cases were dismissed. Proceedings were
abandoned in two other cases.
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© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University(CU).
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