South Africa says the arrest of Putin might scuttle the BRICS conference

Pretoria is legally required to carry out the International Criminal Court’s summons despite being near to Moscow.

A spokeswoman for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Wednesday that the upcoming BRICS conference in South Africa has been “spanned” by the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) order for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

South Africa is required by the 2002 Rome Statute to carry out the arrest warrant issued by the ICC for Putin. The presidents of the five greatest rising economies in the world—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—are scheduled to meet during this year’s BRICS summit in this nation, which will take place in August.

“Attending the summit would be required of all heads of state. But now this ICC warrant has thrown a kink in the works,” Ramaphosa’s spokesperson told reporters.

He said, “What it requires is that there be more conversations around how that is going to be managed, and those interactions are happening. The required announcements will be made after they are over.

Since the warrant’s issuance, Ramaphosa’s administration has been aware of its conundrum; Magwenya last month refused to say whether Pretoria will implement the warrant. Tuesday saw Ramaphosa make the announcement that he will send an ambassador to Washington to explain his “non-aligned” stance on the situation in the Ukraine.

Since the Soviet Union supported the anti-apartheid African National Party, which is currently led by Ramaphosa, South Africa and Russia have been strong allies. While the country’s military participated in joint drills with Russian and Chinese forces earlier this year, South Africa has failed to denounce Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine or impose sanctions on Moscow under his leadership.

In 2017, the ICC reprimanded Pretoria for failing to detain former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he came to the nation in 2015 for an African leaders’ meeting. Pretoria has its own problems with the ICC. South African authorities requested to leave the court following the event, but that order was subsequently overturned after the High Court ruled that it was illegal.

The court charged Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for children’s rights in Russia, with “illegally deporting” children from “occupied parts of Ukraine.” The allegations include Russia’s efforts to evacuate residents from regions that the Ukrainian military had been shelling, particularly in Donbass, a region with a large Russian-speaking population.

Russia has rejected the warrant as “null and invalid from a legal sense,” joining the US, China, and India in not recognising the court’s jurisdiction.