South Africa has put one foot out of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and Burundi too has passed a law to quit the body.

The mood in Africa among the leaders and their supporters is very anti-ICC, and the African Union has spent years railing against it.

The anger boiled over in respect of the cases against Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, and his deputy William Ruto over the 2007 post-election violence.

The case against both leaders eventually collapsed. And of course there is the one against our man Omar al-Bashir for killing his people in the Darfur region.

I am a big supporter of the ICC ideal, but still think South Africa and Burundi’s departure could still be a good thing. Now even The Gambia, of all countries, is jumping up and down saying it’s also getting out.

For all the global human rights ideal it represented, the ICC offered false hope that it could make a difference in discouraging governments and other bad folks from killing people.

But there is no evidence that ICC has such deterrent effect. South Africa has continued its slide into the gutters, with the security forces killing protesting miners.

Xenophobia

There have been two bouts of xenophobic attacks against African migrants in South Africa, in which dozens have been killed, when it was a member of the ICC. In one incident, the police there tied a hapless Mozambican to the bumper of their car and dragged him high at speed to his death along a street.

The years between 2003 and 2007 were easily the freest in Kenya’s history and of any period anywhere in East Africa. Kenya is relatively an internationalist nation, with the cosmopolitan capital in the region that was wearing the ICC badge with honour.

Yet it is exactly during that heady period that it descended into post-election slaughter.

It’s not clear why Burundi would want to leave the ICC, because the regime has probably killed everyone it needed to in the last one-and-a-half years.

The point is that ICC will not save anyone’s neck in a country where the government isn’t already governed by law. Africans will have to do the hard work for domestic human rights, and not let their guard down because their leaders signed up to the Rome Statute.

If South Africa and Burundi help everyone realise they had false hopes, and forces us to think more deeply about how we entrench rule of law at home, their departure would have been a great service.

Indeed for the level of panic and alarm necessary for that to happen, a few more countries need to leave the ICC.

Beyond that, we have been taught a lesson here in how not to construct a global order.

The United States, China, Russia, India are among the countries that have not signed up to the ICC. These countries are just under half of the world’s population, and the US and Russia probably represent half the atrocities countries commit outside their borders in the world.

The world cannot continue with this charade of different strokes for different folks. You have to sympathise with the folks who argue that we are either in this together, or else it isn’t on.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3