For what they are worth, I have made my views on the International Criminal Court (ICC) as clear and as often as possible for about twenty years. The Court, as they would like us to politely call it (it is in reality a non-governmental organization masquerading as a court), is fruit of the poisonous tree, that is to say the 1998 Rome Statute, a founding document described even by its nearest and dearest as seriously flawed. It was hailed nevertheless as a “gift of hope to future generations”, “one of the most significant achievements of human civilization” and “a giant step forward” for global human rights. The ICC has instead emerged as terminally damaged goods peddled by bewigged and begowned snake-oil salesmen such as its disgraced former chief prosecutors, Luis Moreno Ocampo and most recently Karim Khan, and a coterie of incompetent prosecutors, underqualified judges, strangely incurious legal scholars and self-servingly by unaccountable non-governmental organizations within the burgeoning human rights industry. For all the good it was doing, and more importantly, because of all the damage it has already done to the noble cause of justice, it should have been scrapped many years ago. Such a view was a lonely one back in the day. How things have changed, and not just because the US cavalry has recently arrived.

In May 2025, an Australian academic at the University of Sydney, Charlotte Carney, published a scholarly piece in The International Journal of Human Rights entitled ‘Abolishing the International Criminal Court’. (It should be noted that her article appeared before the culmination of the horrendous Karim Khan sexual misconduct scandal which has further rocked the Court and the ICC ecosystem to its very core.) She outlines processes of refusal, relationality, decentering, delegitimizing and dismantling the Court and unambiguously argues that the ICC must be abolished. Carney cannot be described as a........

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