Human rights leaders demand action: Why is the ICC delaying Maduro’s arrest warrant?

Andres Oppenheimer

A key missing piece in U.S. and Latin American pressures to get Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to allow a transition to democracy is the International Criminal Court’s failure to issue a warrant for his arrest. Many human rights groups are publicly asking: Is the ICC protecting Maduro?

The Netherlands-based ICC, which looks into crimes against humanity and war crimes, has been investigating Maduro’s human rights abuses for several years. It opened a preliminary probe into Maduro’s crimes against humanity in 2018, at the request of six countries, and turned it into an official investigation in 2021.

By comparison, it took the ICC only one year to investigate and issue an arrest warrant last year against Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin for crimes committed in his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

And it took the ICC prosecutor only a seven-month investigation to announce on May 20 that he will seek arrest warrants against Yahya Sinwar, the head of the Hamas terrorist group, and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for crimes committed in the Israel-Hamas war that unfolded after Oct. 7, 2023. The ICC has not yet formally issued its arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu.

In Venezuela’s case, the ICC prosecutor’s office has not even announced its intention to ask for Maduro’s arrest, despite United Nations and independent reports showing that thousands of people have been killed by his death squads since he took office in 2013.

“Prosecutor Karim Khan’s silence in the face of the crisis in Venezuela is alarming,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, advocacy director with the Amnesty International human rights group, in a statement. “The present increase in the scale and gravity of acts being committed against Venezuelans demands immediate action from the Prosecutor.”

Separately, a group of more than a dozen former heads of Latin American regional human rights institutions issued a statement Aug. 12 calling on the ICC to take immediate actions against Maduro.

Santiago Cantón, the Geneva-based secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists and former head of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, who is one of the letter’s signatories, told me that “there’s an excess of patience, or naiveté, on the part of the ICC prosecutor’s office.”

Cantón added, “It’s time for the prosecutor to act: there are deaths and disappearances in Venezuela. There are times when you can’t look the other way.”

ICC’s chief prosecutor Khan said Monday that his office is “actively monitoring” the situation in Venezuela. His office did not respond to my email asking for further elaboration, but sources close to it tell me that Khan believes that, under ICC rules, he must first allow Venezuelan courts to take the first crack at prosecuting crimes against humanity.

It’s hard to understand why the ICC prosecutor is still giving Maduro’s government-controlled courts the benefit of the doubt. Maduro’s human rights violations rank among the world’s worst.

In 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights office reported that Maduro regime death squads were responsible for more than 7,000 extrajudicial deaths of street protesters in the previous 18 months.

Since the July 28 elections, at least 23 people, including a 15-year-old, have been killed by government gunmen for participating in protests, according to the Victims Monitor rights group. The Venezuelan regime has said that more than 2,200 have been arrested since the elections.

Former ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo says that Khan’s latest statement that he is “actively monitoring” what’s happening in Venezuela is a sign that the prosecutor may soon issue an arrest warrant against Maduro.

Khan issued similar warnings against Putin and Netanyahu shortly before ordering their arrests, and there’s a “high chance” that the prosecutor will do the same with Maduro, Moreno Ocampo told CNN en Español.

However, ICC critics say the ICC’s decisions are often biased and erratic. The ICC’s prosecutor’s recent announcement of his pending arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Hamas’ Sinwar was described by President Biden as “outrageous.” There is no equivalence between Israel and the terrorist group that attacked it on Oct. 7 last year, Biden said.

The ICC, created in 2002, has 124 member countries, including Venezuela. The United States, Russia, China and Israel have not joined it.

If Khan issues an international arrest warrant against Maduro in coming days or weeks, as his predecessor Moreno Ocampo believes, it will be a formidable tool to help press the Venezuelan dictator to accept a negotiated transition to democracy, perhaps in exchange for some form of amnesty.

But if Khan continues sitting on the case, it will be a scandalous omission and a new stain on the ICC’s image.