| Summary: | This article analyses the tensions that drove African countries away from its initial enthusiasm for the International Criminal Court (ICC) and instead towards an alternative regional international criminal justice mechanism, established in 2014 with the signing of the Malabo Protocol. Although the legal tensions between the African Court and the ICC seem to have subsided, its seeds have not disappeared, and nor has the judicial and political infrastructure needed to eventually create the alternative mechanism proposed in the Protocol. The countries of the Global North that are the main supporters to the ICC would therefore do well to learn the lessons of the conflict, so as not to encourage the collective withdrawal of the African countries in the coming years from the Rome Statute.
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