The International Criminal Court’s March 17 decision to issue war crimes charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin was shocking in more ways than one. This was the first time in 12 years a head of state has been charged by the international court; in 2011, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was indicted on two counts of crimes against humanity for his indiscriminate crackdown on protests. Gadhafi, however, was a tinpot dictator of a small, largely inconsequential North African state — not a major player in the international system ruling one of the world’s largest oil and natural gas producers, with nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads to boot.
Theoretically, every country on the planet now has a choice to make: If Putin happens to set foot on their soil, will they abide by the ICC and formally arrest him, or will they give the Russian strongman a degree of sovereign immunity and allow him to pass through?
For countries in the West, this isn’t much of a question — Germany, for instance, wasted no time reminding people that it would be obligated to hand Putin over to The Hague if he were stupid enough to land on German territory. Others such as South Africa that are state parties to the court but are nonetheless skeptical of its remit may make a different calculation. There was a time not so long ago when South Africa permitted then-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, wanted for crimes against humanity in Darfur, to enter and leave the country unhindered.
