Chad’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Monday Adding that it had informed the UN Secretary-General of its intention to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the international agreement that underpins the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Chad is the fourth francophone African country whose government is too closely linked to its military to take such a step in less than a year — following a coordinated exit last September by the juntas that run Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
The ICC prosecutes individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity; Its operations began in 2002.
What did the government of Chad say about the ICC’s withdrawal?
The Foreign Ministry said its decision was taken “after a thorough review of the functioning of the International Criminal Court and its record since it began operations in 2002, the effectiveness of which remains limited and uneven in different regions.”
It added that the court’s own record of prosecution “reveals in principle unquestionable and serious selectivity, whether this selectivity was desired or not.”
The statement listed ICC investigations launched since the court’s establishment, saying that nine of the 13 cases were related to African states, while only four were related to other regions of the world and were so far “without any concrete progress”.
It said that of the seven individuals detained as a result of the ICC investigation, only one came from a situation beyond the African continent.
The Ministry of External Affairs alleged that this reflected a permanent concentration of ICC cases focused on “the global South in general and the African continent in particular”. Chad also appealed to other African Union members to follow in his footsteps.
The statement, signed by Foreign Ministry spokesman Ibrahim Adam Mahamat, concluded, “This irreversible decision of Chad in no way constitutes an abandonment of the moral imperative to provide justice to victims; rather, it reflects the conviction that national judicial systems and African judicial mechanisms are fully capable of carrying out this mission with dignity.”
What did Chad say about America’s role in this move?
Last Thursday, Chad’s Foreign Ministry also raised the issue of ICC.
In a statement following talks between the Chadian minister and a US official for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Frank Garcia Jr., the government in N’Djamena said the US had urged it to reconsider its ICC membership.
“The US side expressed its concern about the functionality of this institution and wished that Chad re-examined its commitment to the Rome Statute,” Ministry wrote. Chad said it “indicates that this request will be investigated by the responsible authorities.”
The withdrawal comes on the heels of last week’s vote to fire ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan amid sexual misconduct allegations.
Like Russia and many other major countries, the US never ratified the Rome Statute and signed the ICC in its entirety. However, previous administrations in Washington were broadly supportive of the court’s work.
This has notably changed since the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister soon after Donald Trump secured his second appointment to office in November 2024. Second, the Trump administration has frequently been critical of both the independent ICC and the United Nations, under whose auspices the Rome Statute mechanism was negotiated.
Why might Chad and President Mahamat Idriss Déby fear the ICC?
While Chad now has a nominal civilian government, the same family with close ties to the military has been in charge for more than 35 years.
Former President Idriss Deby came to power in a military coup in the late 1990s. He was in office for more than 30 years before news of his death broke in April 2021. According to Chadian accounts, the former general died fighting on the front lines against an insurgency in the country’s north, just a day after news of his election victory for the sixth consecutive term was announced in a vote marked by protests and widespread arrests.
His son, another general, Mahamat Idris Déby, was named head of a transitional military council following Déby’s death, which dissolved the government.
In October 2022, he extended his interim mandate, allowing public protests to be violently suppressed. Dozens of people were killed and several opposition parties were banned in response.
By 2024, following a constitutional referendum, Mahamat Déby stood in the presidential election. The main challenger still allowed to run was his own Prime Minister Sukes Masra, who had returned from exile in the US earlier that year. Debbie Young won with 60.1% of the vote, although Massara and other opposition groups disputed the results. Massara was arrested in May 2025, accused of inciting hatred amid violent clashes that the government defined as an “attempted coup”. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison last August.
Chad is still fighting a nearly decade-long insurgency led by two groups in the north of the country, whose previous base is in southern Libya. It also faces an influx of refugees from the Sudanese civil war and various other sources of domestic unrest.
The three other West African countries that pulled out of the ICC last September – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – are all under the so-called interim leadership of military juntas following the 2020 coup in Mali, the 2022 takeover in Burkina Faso and the 2023 coup in Niger.
Edited by: Jennifer Cimino Gonzalez
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