Alex de Waal

Last Monday, three judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague delivered their verdict on Ali Abdelrahman Kushayb: guilty on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed in Darfur, Sudan, during 2003 and 2004. It was an exemplary case, meticulously prepared and presented. It took three and a half years from the opening session to the verdict. Seventy-eight witnesses gave evidence in court. Stacks of documents were presented and pored over. I was the first witness, summoned in April 2022 by both the prosecution and the defence – an unusual arrangement in a tribunal based on the adversarial system – to help the court establish agreed facts about the background to the case and the conflict in Darfur.

Twice already during this war, the people of Gaza have pulled back from the brink of categorical famine – both times after warnings from the IPC – but the recovery has been momentary before another plunge. Few humanitarian workers believe this cycle of deprivation followed by partial respite can continue for much longer before there’s rapid and uncontrollable collapse.

Seventeen years ago, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first person to hold the post of prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, decided to push international criminal law to a new boundary. He would make a head of state into a fugitive from justice. His target was the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for crimes in Darfur. The current ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, has thrown down another gauntlet.

Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is, by numbers, the biggest in the world. Sudan’s population is 48 million, of whom more than 25 million are facing ‘high levels of acute food insecurity’.