The formal suspension of its Chief Prosecutor accused of grave sexual misconduct (the second of its three chief prosecutors to date caught up in such claims), has highlighted the rot at the heart of International Criminal Court (ICC). The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute and adopted by delegates to the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court in Rome on 17 July 1998. The Court opened its doors on 1 July 2002, following ratification by 60 states. Based in The Hague, Netherlands, it is a treaty-based court, governed by the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) — its signatories — and is designed to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.

The international community was promised an exemplary body staffed by exemplary prosecutors and exemplary judges. The institution that has emerged has fallen very short of the promises that were made by its supporters. The appalling professional and moral shortcomings of ICC prosecutors aside, the ICC’s judges have similarly exposed the many failings of this court. On 17 May 2017, for example, an International Criminal Court Judge, Marc Perrin de Brichambaut, gave a talk at Peking Law School. The presentation was videoed and, unfortunately for him but luckily for observers of the Court, subsequently transcribed and published. The talk provided outsiders with a window into the reality of the Court in the words of a key insider, as opposed to the judicial fantasy that has been projected by its European masters and supporters within national and international human rights industries. De Brichambaut demonstrated the European arrogance and racism at the heart of the Court and candidly described a subprime body delivering subprime “justice”.

Judge de Brichambaut personified virtually everything that is wrong about the ICC. To start with, de Brichambaut is not really a judge as would be understood in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence or popular culture. As is clear from his curriculum vitae he is a French and European bureaucrat, diplomat and academic, deemed safe and compliant enough to be elected by the ASP to the ICC bench. In that respect de Brichambaut is typical of the pseudo-judges appointed to serve in The Hague. He worked as a civil servant at the Council of State in France and then from 1983-98 he worked for the French Foreign Ministry, including as Cultural Counsellor at the French embassy in the United States. He headed the French delegation to the Rome Conference and signed the Rome Statute of the ICC on behalf of France. He subsequently served at the French Ministry of the Armed Forces and from 2011 to 2015 was the Secretary General of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in........

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