Deputy Minister Obed Bapela says the government plans to change its laws so that it has the power to decide whether Russian President Vladimir Putin can be arrested or not.
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‘In June we’ll be submitting the law in parliament,’ says Bapela, adding that the country will ‘give itself exemptions of who to arrest and who not to arrest’ under the new law, which in its current state obligates South Africa to arrest President Putin if he enters the country.
This is due to the fact that South Africa is a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued an arrest warrant for President Putin in March following the war in Ukraine.
The government also plans to apply to the ICC for a waiver in regard to Article 98 of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the war crimes court in 2022. Although Article 27 states that no one is immune from prosecution by the ICC, Article 98 suggests that the institution can’t expect South Africa to arrest President Putin unless Russia agrees to waive his immunity from prosecution.
The BBC reports that Pretoria has granted diplomatic immunity to Russian officials in the interim, which the foreign affairs department has described as standard procedure. South Africa is also insisting on remaining neutral in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In the meantime, the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), launched a court application to obligate authorities to arrest President Putin if he arrives in August.
Bapela criticised the ICC, noting that the late President Nelson Mandela ‘would have been disappointed’ by the war crimes court. Referring to the former UK and US leaders and their invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bapela says the government ‘never thought that the ICC that we have today will be what it is. They never indicted Tony Blair, they never indicted [George W] Bush for their killings of Iraq people. Mandela would have said [that] the inequality, the inconsistency by the ICC, is a problem.’
He also referred to past exemptions from international justice, such as when the United Kingdom (UK) decided not to extradite Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet in 1998. Pinochet was arrested in London at the behest of a Spanish judge looking to put him on trial for human rights violations during his 17-year rule. The UK government freed him after 16 months.
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Picture: The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa