Briefing the media on Sunday in Pretoria, the spokesperson for the Presidency Vincent Magwenya said they have taken note of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) warrant of arrest for Russia’s head of state, Vladimir Putin.
The ICC’s warrant of arrest comes ahead of the BRICS Summit which will be chaired by South Africa from 22 to 24 August 2023, under the theme’’ BRICS and Africa: Partnership for mutually accelerated growth, sustainable development and inclusive multilateralism”.
Putin is expected to attend the Brics summit along with his Brics partners President Xi Jinping of China, Brazil’s Lula da Silva and India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Magwenya said the country is maintaining its stance in hoping that the Ukraine conflict will be resolved through peaceful means.
Magwenya said that South Africa will remain in touch with all key stakeholders before the summit.
“With respect to the ICC, we note the report on the warrant of arrest that the ICC has issued against President Putin. We as a government are cognisant of our legal obligation. However, between now and the summit we will remain engaged with relevant stakeholders with respect to the summit and other issues related,” he emphasized.
The warrant for Putin’s arrest is on suspicion of the illegal exiling of children and the unlawful transfer of people from Ukraine’s territory to the Russian Federation.
This warrant of arrest is further extended to his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. In a statement published and circulated online, the ICC said: ‘’There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the alleged crimes, for having committed them directly alongside others, and for his failure to exercise proper control over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts”.
Putin will be the third president to be a subject of an ICC warrant of arrest after two African leaders Sudanese Omar-Al-Bashir and Colonel Maummar Gaddafi of Libya were also the subjects of the ICC justice.
This is not the first time that South Africa has been put on the spot because of an ICC Finding. When in 2015 Omar Bashir visited South Africa and the country refused to arrest him, this brought to the fore issues of how the ICC expects other countries to do its work.
Bashir was wanted by the ICC on charges of war crimes against humanity, the court said and he then visited South Africa in 2015 for the African Union Summit.
The ICC then ruled that SA had failed to comply with its obligations as a signatory to the Rome Statute but the matter wasn’t taken any further.
