Parliament. The Parliamentary proceedings will take some months and certainly well into the first quarter of 2017. Under the South African Constitution, controversial legislation is required to be debated by both Houses of Parliament, and in addition, there is required to be a full public debate between the Houses of Parliament and the public at large. An opportunity has to be given to civil society to make known to Parliament its views and concerns. There will undoubtedly be a vigorous debate. It is my hope that time and the ensuing debate might help persuade the South African Government to reconsider this unfortunate and regressive step.

In considering such a change of stance with regard to the Rome Statute, attention should be given by our present leaders to the supportive role South Africa played in the drafting of Rome Statute and in the debates that took place at the 1998 Rome Conference. And, after the Statute was agreed upon, South Africa played an active role in helping persuade other Southern African countries to ratify it. South Africa played those roles in the context of the material support that was furnished by international community in bringing to an end the abhorrent Apartheid policy that for decades had oppressed and victimized the majority of our people. As early as 1973 the United Nations agreed upon the terms of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. That convention appropriately determined that Apartheid constituted a crime against humanity.

The first democratic government in the history of South Africa, headed by President Nelson Mandela, was a staunch supporter of international criminal justice and the system of complementarity which underlies the Rome Statute. South African lawyers took pride in the principled stand our Government took to bring an end to impunity for those responsible for the most heinous international crimes - genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It identified with the victims and survivors of those crimes. It would be counter to those principles now to withdraw from the Rome Statute.

One of the grounds of recent African opposition to the Rome Statute is that it does not grant head of state immunity. Such immunity, I would suggest, would run counter to developments in international criminal justice during the past 75 years. In the London Agreement under which the Nuremberg Tribunal operated in 1945, head of state immunity was expressly disallowed as a defense. And that position with regard to international crimes has been reflected in international criminal law ever since. Those most responsible for the commission of international atrocity crimes are the individuals who give the orders for them to be perpetrated. It is those leaders who should, before all others, be brought to justice. The International Court of Justice, in the case of Democratic Republic of the Congo v Belgium recognized that in customary international law heads of state and government and ministers of foreign affairs enjoyed absolute immunity from investigation and prosecution. It recognized too that such immunity did not protect leaders who faced charges for international crimes in an international criminal court.

It has also been suggested that mediating civil wars, such as that in Sudan, is hindered by non-recognition of head of state immunity. I have difficulty in understanding why any mediating efforts should not be held in the country where the crimes are being committed. If South Africa was indeed playing a mediating role in Sudan that was no good reason for inviting President Al-Bashir to South Africa at a time when he was subject to a warrant of arrest issued by the ICC on charges including genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes.

At the recent meeting of the Assembly of States Parties held in The Hague, the South African Minister of Justice reported that he had held constructive discussions with the President of the ICC, Silvia Fernández de Gurmendi. It would be in the interests of the victims of international crimes, wherever they might be, for that discussion to lead to a reconsideration by the South African Government of its decision to withdraw from the Rome Statute. There are clearly imperfections in the Rome Statute, in the manner in which the ICC is running its affairs, and in the imbalance of the situations presently before the ICC. Those problems should be considered and resolved by the States Parties to the Rome Statute by discussion and negotiation. Withdrawal is a wholly inappropriate route on which to embark. It would amount to turning a deaf ear to the cries for justice from millions of victims on our own continent and beyond.