On Wednesday, the UN Security Council convened to hear an update from the International Criminal Court on its work in Sudan's Darfur region — a referral that dates to 2005 and a war that has never really paused. The briefing arrived at a peculiar moment. Even as ICC prosecutors document fresh atrocities committed by both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in the conflict that erupted in April 2023, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has launched what he describes as a campaign to "dismantle" the Court altogether. Atrocity documentation on one end of the table; institutional demolition on the other.
The juxtaposition reveals something the architecture of international criminal justice has never resolved: who decides which crimes reach the docket, who funds the prosecution, and whose sovereignty yields to whose jurisdiction. These are not procedural questions. They are the load-bearing walls of the entire enterprise, and they are cracking.
Darfur as a Permanent Open File
The Darfur referral — UNSC Resolution 1593, passed in March 2005 — was itself a rupture. For the first time, the Security Council used its Chapter VII authority to refer a situation to the ICC in a country that had not ratified the Rome Statute. Sudan had no say. The Council, which contains two permanent members that have never joined the Court and a third that subsequently withdrew its signature, nonetheless compelled a non-member state to submit to ICC jurisdiction. The logic was humanitarian. The politics were uncomfortable from the start.
Four members abstained on that vote: China, Russia, Algeria — and the United States. Also abstaining: India. New Delhi's position reflected its broader doctrine that international legal mechanisms require the consent of those they govern, and that referrals engineered by a handful of permanent members carry an inherent legitimacy deficit. Indian officials at the time, and analysts since, have been careful to distinguish this position from any tolerance of the crimes themselves. The abstention was about architecture, not impunity.
Twenty-one years later, the file remains open. Warrants exist for Sudanese officials, including former President Omar al-Bashir, who was deposed in 2019. Bashir was subsequently detained inside Sudan but never transferred to The Hague. The RSF and SAF are now accused of committing what the briefing's focus suggests may constitute new crimes against humanity in the resumed war. The Court documents; the arrests don't come; the Council meets and hears the update and disperses. The machinery functions. Whether it delivers justice is a different question.
Rubio's Campaign and the Architecture It Targets
Secretary Rubio's push to dismantle the ICC is not the first time Washington has threatened the Court. The Bush administration unsigned the Rome Statute in 2002. The Trump administration's first term imposed sanctions on ICC officials after the Court opened a preliminary examination touching on US personnel in Afghanistan. What marks the current campaign as potentially more consequential is the timing: it arrives as the Court is under simultaneous pressure from multiple flanks, its African credibility eroded by a perception of selective targeting, its European backing increasingly performative rather than structural.
The African grievance has deep roots. Of the ICC's roughly thirty cases since its founding, an overwhelming proportion involve African defendants and African situations. This is partly a function of referral patterns — African Union members and the Security Council have both directed the Court toward the continent — and partly a function of where the Court's investigators have chosen to focus. The result is a widespread conviction across African capitals that the ICC is an instrument of Northern power rather than universal justice. Several African states have threatened withdrawal. Some have acted on the threat.
This perception is the live geopolitical material that the Rubio campaign now intersects with. When Washington attacks the Court, it does so from the right — sovereignty, American exceptionalism, rejection of external jurisdiction. When African states attack the Court, they do so from an entirely different position — colonial continuity, selective prosecution, institutional racism. These are incompatible critiques that happen to produce the same institutional pressure. The Court sits between them, increasingly unable to claim the universal mandate its founders imagined.
India's Structural Advantage in a Collapsing Centre
Here is where India's position becomes analytically interesting rather than merely consistent. New Delhi has never ratified the Rome Statute. It has, as the 2005 abstention demonstrated, declined to be co-opted into enforcement mechanisms it did not design. Former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran has argued that India's non-engagement with international legal architecture leaves it without leverage when that architecture is being remade — a point worth taking seriously as the ICC enters what may be a defining institutional crisis.
But the structural condition has shifted in India's favour. India now hosts the Voice of the Global South platform, which brought together 173 dignitaries from 123 countries at its third summit in August 2024. That platform — built explicitly on the philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, one earth and one family — gives New Delhi a convening authority over precisely the states most aggrieved by the ICC's African targeting record. India did not create that grievance. It does not share it in the same form. But it is positioned to engage it as a legitimate reform agenda rather than a demolition project.
The distinction matters. Rubio's campaign to dismantle the Court offers African states the satisfaction of watching an institution they distrust come under pressure from its most powerful critic — but it leaves them with nothing. No reformed Court, no alternative mechanism, no improved accountability. India can offer something different: the argument that international criminal accountability should rest on universal jurisdiction, non-selective referrals, and consent-based prosecution frameworks. This is not an argument India invented. It is an argument India's own sovereign doctrine has always implied.
The Diaspora and the Trade Route
There is a more immediate register too. Sudan's war has displaced millions and created one of the world's most acute humanitarian crises. India conducted Operation Kaveri in 2023 to evacuate its nationals from the conflict zone — a demonstration that New Delhi has skin in Sudan's stability that goes beyond abstract multilateral posture. The Red Sea trade routes that carry Indian exports and energy imports pass through waters whose security degrades as Sudan's coastline and Port Sudan come under pressure from a war with no visible end. Instability in Sudan is not a distant tragedy for India; it is a supply-chain and diaspora risk that Indian planners are already managing.
This material stake is worth naming precisely because India's ICC posture is sometimes portrayed as purely doctrinal — sovereignty-speak with no operational consequence. A Sudan that never achieves a political settlement, partly because accountability mechanisms lack credibility and partly because the Security Council's referral apparatus has been discredited, is a Sudan that stays dangerous for longer. India's interest in seeing the war end, its nationals safe, and the Red Sea stabilised is an interest in seeing accountability mechanisms that actually work — which is a different thing from supporting the ICC in its current form unconditionally.
The Norm-Shaper's Obligation
India's UNSC permanent membership bid is a long game. The states most likely to support India's candidacy include both European powers that champion the ICC and African states that have threatened to leave it. India's ability to hold those relationships simultaneously depends on being seen as a country that engages institutional questions seriously rather than one that simply abstains and moves on. Happymon Jacob of the Council for Strategic and International Affairs has argued that India's non-ratification of the Rome Statute reflects a coherent sovereignty doctrine. That coherence is the foundation. What it now requires is a superstructure — an active Indian proposal for what reformed international criminal accountability should look like, articulated through the Voice of the Global South and reinforced in multilateral legal forums.
The ICC will not be dismantled by Rubio's campaign. The Court has enough institutional inertia and European backing to survive American pressure, as it has before. But it will emerge from this period weaker, more contested, and more dependent on a legitimacy argument it has never successfully made to the Global South. That is precisely the moment when a country with India's profile — major democracy, non-member of the Rome Statute, convener of the developing world, aspirant to permanent Security Council membership — can move from the abstention column into the drafting room. The question New Delhi should be answering is not whether to join the ICC as currently constituted, but what international criminal accountability should look like in a genuinely multipolar order — and whether India wants to write that answer or wait for someone else to write it first.
