Chad notifies UN of withdrawal from the International Criminal Court

The government of Chad has deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations notification of its withdrawal from the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the International Criminal Court. The procedure followed is the one set out in Article 127 of the Statute, which sets a twelve-month period between notification and effective withdrawal: the separation between N’Djamena and the Hague tribunal will thus be finalized in July 2027. The declaration bears the signature of the spokesman of the Chadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ibrahim Adam Mahamat (Agenzia Nova, Il Post).

The argument put forward by the government is statistical in nature. In the note, N’Djamena cites Court data updated to May 11: of thirteen open investigations, nine concern African countries. From that proportion the ministry draws the accusation of selectivity in the exercise of The Hague’s prosecutorial action, and the conclusion that the continent needs its own instruments. The Chadian executive has issued an explicit invitation to the African Union to accelerate the construction of continental judicial mechanisms, indicating as its goal “a fairer, more balanced, more credible continental justice” (government of Chad).

The Court, for its part, has in the past rejected the accusation of bias, noting that several of the first investigations were opened at the request of the African governments concerned — as was the case with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which turned to The Hague on their own initiative (Rivista Africa). The two readings are not mutually exclusive in terms of numbers: they count the same set of proceedings while attributing different origins to them, one looking at where the defendants are located, the other at who requested the intervention.

The most significant contextual factor, however, is not the individual withdrawal but its serial nature. Chad is the fourth African state to announce withdrawal, after Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the three central Sahel countries that left the Economic Community of West African States and are governed by administrations installed through coups d’état: for them too, the twelve-month deadline expires in 2027 (Il Sole 24 Ore). Within a few months, therefore, a contiguous geographic bloc — the Sahelian belt stretching from the Atlantic to the Lake Chad basin — will find itself collectively outside The Hague’s jurisdiction. For a Court with no police force of its own, entirely dependent on the cooperation of states party for arrests, transfers and evidence gathering, the loss of a contiguous area weighs more heavily than the sum of the individual withdrawals.

Chad also holds a specific position: it is one of the military actors in the Lake Chad region and has for years hosted Western counterterrorism deployments. Its withdrawal signals that the detachment from The Hague is not confined to governments born of institutional ruptures, but also affects partners that European and American allies had treated as stable.

Gray areas remain that the available material does not clarify. It is not documented, in the sources consulted, whether Chad has any proceedings pending before the Court, nor what formal position the African Union has taken on N’Djamena’s request: the organization has been discussing for over a decade the expansion of the criminal jurisdiction of its own African Court of Justice and Human Rights, without the relevant protocol having entered into force. In the absence of an operational continental response, the immediate effect of the withdrawal is a reduction in the area over which The Hague can count on cooperation obligations.

The timeline is set: July 2027 for Chad, the same year for the other three. Until that date, the states remain party to the Statute and bound by its obligations.

Sources: Agenzia Nova; Rivista Africa; Il Post; Il Sole 24 Ore (English-language edition, report from Nairobi).