International Law Is Dying in Public, and Africa Must Decide What Comes Next
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel bombed Iran. Within days, over 100 international law professors signed a public letter saying the same thing in plain language: it was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced, from an official government platform, that “no quarter” would be given to enemies in Iran. Declaring no quarter, refusing to accept surrender, is not just aggressive rhetoric. It is a war crime.
And the International Criminal Court, built precisely to prosecute such acts, said nothing.
If you are African, none of this should surprise you.
Africa has known this truth for generations: the rules of the international order are real when applied to the weak and optional when they inconvenience the strong. What is new is not the behaviour. What is new is that the powerful have stopped pretending.
The Rules Were Written Without Us
When 50 nations gathered in San Francisco in 1945 to draft the UN Charter, the document that would govern the world, only four African countries were present: Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and apartheid South Africa. The rest of the continent was absent. Not because Africans had nothing to say. Because they were colonised by the very powers writing the rules. Britain, France, and Belgium, empires whose African subjects were not invited, signed a document proclaiming the “equal rights of all nations large and small.”
When the UN was founded, 750 million people, nearly a third of humanity, lived under colonial rule. Most of them were African. None of them was asked about the architecture being built above their heads. When African states finally gained independence and joined the UN in the 1960s, they entered a house whose structure had already been decided. The permanent five seats on the Security Council, each with a veto, had already been assigned. Every single permanent member is either a former colonial empire or a great power that has used military force against smaller states without authorisation. The veto is not an administrative detail. It is a constitutional guarantee that the powerful can never be held to account by the institution they built to hold others accountable.
Africa understood this. That is why, when the International Criminal Court was created in 1998, Africa showed up with more commitment than anyone else. A third of the 120 states that voted in favour of the Rome Statute were African, the single largest bloc. Africa believed in international criminal justice precisely because it had experienced what a world without it looked like. That belief was not repaid in kind.
The Court That Forgot What It Was Built For
The ICC’s record is not difficult to read. Nine of its ten formal investigation situations have been in African countries. Its cases have overwhelmingly targeted African leaders. Meanwhile, the same court has watched war crimes evidence accumulate in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Gaza, and now in Iran, and found reasons to look elsewhere.
In April 2026, the ICC’s own founding prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, held up the court’s indictment of Vladimir Putin for destroying Ukraine’s civilian electricity system. Then he looked at US threats to destroy Iranian power plants and said, “My suggestion: you read the indictment of the Russians, change the name, and it is very similar.”
Identical conduct. One indicted. One not. The difference is not legal. It is structural.
The United States never joined the ICC. It passed a law authorising the President to use military force to free any American detained by the court, legislation critics nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act.” It spent the 1990s pressuring African states to join the ICC, while simultaneously threatening to cut military aid to any country that refused to sign bilateral immunity agreements protecting American citizens from prosecution. The system was designed with these escape routes built in. Africa was invited into an institution whose exits were reserved for others.
Former African Union Commission Chairperson Jean Ping called the ICC “a colonial tool whose task is to try African leaders in power.” Many dismissed that as political theatre. The founding prosecutor of the institution itself has now confirmed, in public, at Harvard, that the standard applied to Putin is not being applied to Washington. That is not theatre. That is the architecture revealing itself.
This Is Not a Collapse. It Is a Revelation.
Here is the distinction that matters most: the rules-based international order is not collapsing. It is being revealed.
If it is collapsing, a new crisis, a sudden departure from a system that previously worked, then the correct response is to defend what existed. That is the response of Western liberals who built the system and believed their own stories about it.
But if it is being revealed, if the mask is simply slipping from a system that always operated this way, just more quietly, then the correct response is clarity. The 2003 Iraq invasion violated the same Charter. The then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it was “not in conformity with the UN Charter.” The world chose not to look. Now the same country is back, doing the same thing, louder. The break was not made in 2026. It was made in 2003. The only thing that has changed is that the pretence is gone.
For Africa, the question this moment poses is this: when the mask finally slips from a system that never fully served you, what do you do with the clarity?
What Africa Must Do With the Clarity
Cynicism would be the easiest response, to conclude that international law was always fiction and that Africa should stop participating in institutions that have failed it. This would be a serious mistake. An imperfect law still protects the weak more than no law. The UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force is the single most important legal protection that small states possess. Without it, only military power determines who survives. Africa is not yet the most powerful military force on the planet. Walking away from the rules does not benefit Africa. Demanding better rules does.
The current moment gives Africa three concrete levers it has never had at the same time.
First, demand Security Council reform now. Africa has 54 UN votes and no permanent Security Council seat on a body that governs the use of force for 8 billion people. The Ezulwini Consensus has demanded at least two permanent African seats for decades. The 2026 war, which has left the Security Council paralysed and irrelevant, is the strongest argument for reform that has ever been made. Africa must make it loudly, collectively, and without apology.
Second, activate the ICC’s crime of aggression jurisdiction. At the 2010 Kampala Review Conference, African states helped negotiate a definition of the crime of aggression, the act of launching an unlawful war, that the ICC could finally prosecute. The US, UK, and France immediately inserted conditions that blocked their own nationals from being charged. Africa must push, as the ICC’s largest bloc, to remove those conditions and apply the law equally. If the court refuses, Africa will have made the double standard undeniable in international law itself.
Third, the African Union must speak with a spine. The AU’s statement on the Iran war called for “restraint.” It did not name the February 28 strikes as a violation of international law, even as 100 legal scholars were doing exactly that. Africa’s credibility as a principled actor depends on applying the same standard to all parties. When Africa refused to name Russia’s invasion of Ukraine clearly, the West accused it of double standards. Africa cannot now apply a different standard to Washington. Principled consistency is not just morally correct. It is the only foreign policy posture that builds lasting credibility.
The rules-based order was written in 1945 by empires whose colonies were not invited to speak. It was enforced for 80 years with one standard for the powerful and another for everyone else. What is happening now is not new. It is old, finally visible.
Africa has 54 UN votes. It holds the minerals the world’s technology requires. It sits astride the maritime routes that global trade now depends upon. It has 1.4 billion people and the moral authority of a continent that has seen, more directly than anywhere else, what happens when the powerful decide the rules do not apply to them.
The order that excluded Africa is breaking. The question is not whether Africa will be in the room when the next one is built. The question is whether Africa will have the courage to help design it, or whether it will again accept the keys to a house it did not build, with locks it cannot change.
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