One of South Africa’s main opposition political party (The Democratic Alliance) said on Tuesday that it had taken legal action to ensure that Vladimir Putin would be arrested if he set foot in the country, where he is due to attend a summit in August later this year.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) is asking the courts for “an order” ordering that if Mr Putin arrives in South Africa to take part in the BRICS summit (a group of countries comprising South Africa, Brazil, China, India, and Russia), the government must arrest him, as required by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The ICC, based in The Hague, Netherlands issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin in March for the war crimes committed in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis of war crimes the ICC accuses Mr Putin of deporting Ukrainian children as part of Moscow’s offensive against Ukraine.
As South Africa is a member of the ICC, it is theoretically supposed to arrest the Russian president on his arrival in the country but the Pretoria government which maintains close diplomatic relations with Moscow and insists on its “neutrality” in the conflict in Ukraine, has not yet indicated whether it will do so if Mr Putin steps in the country.
Earlier, the Kremlin spokesman Boris Peskov was quoted saying that Russia would be “duly represented” at the BRICS summit, in South Africa without specifying whether Mr Putin planned to attend, Moscow “assumes, of course” that its BRICS partners “will not be guided” by “illegitimate decisions”, namely the ICC arrest warrant, he added.
South Africa has always been criticized since the start of the war in Ukraine for its proximity to Moscow. In April, Mr Ramaphosa said that the ICC’s arrest warrant against Mr. Putin was putting a “spanner in the works” for South Africa.
