They Can Sanction a Court, But They Cannot Sanction the Truth: Why the World Must Stand Up for the ICC Now.

Feature Article They Can Sanction a Court, But They Cannot Sanction the Truth: Why the World Must Stand Up for the ICC Now.

SUN, 01 NOV 2026

I am writing this from Accra, and I am angry.

I am angry because this autumn, the most powerful government on earth moved from punishing individual judges to targeting an entire court.

On 9 October, the United States imposed institutional sanctions on the International Criminal Court. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called the sanctions "unacceptable."

He is right.
But a statement is not a shield, and the victims of the world's worst crimes need a shield.

Let us be clear about what is happening.
Since February 2025, Washington has sanctioned half of the Court's eighteen judges, its former Prosecutor, and both Deputy Prosecutors.

In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to take the Court apart "brick by brick."

On 22 September, the US President stood before the United Nations General Assembly and urged member states to abandon the Court.

This is not a legal disagreement.
It is a campaign to destroy the one permanent court capable of prosecuting genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity when national courts refuse or fail to act.

Why This Is Not Only About Europe or the Middle East

Some people in my part of the world will ask:

"Why should I care? This is a fight between big powers."

I care because I know who the ICC was built for.

It was built for the market woman whose village was burned.

For the child soldier who was abducted.
For the student who disappeared into a prison cell and never came home.

Powerful people have never needed international courts.

They have armies.
They have lawyers.
They have friends in high places.
The Rome Statute was written for everyone else.

And the retreat from accountability has already begun.

Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger announced their withdrawal in June.

Venezuela followed in July.
Chad followed in August.
Africa should look carefully at that list and ask a difficult question:

Who gains when a court for victims loses its members?

Not the victims.
Ghana is a State Party to the Rome Statute.
We must never join the list of those who walked away.

A Word to Those Who Say the Court Is Unfair

I have heard many Africans argue that the ICC has devoted too much attention to our continent.

I do not dismiss that frustration.
Selective justice is an injustice of its own.

But the cure for selective justice is more justice, not no justice.

Demand that the Court investigate the powerful wherever they are.

Demand that it pursue every perpetrator regardless of nationality, military rank, or political influence.

But do not celebrate while powerful governments dismantle the institution for daring to look in their direction.

The answer to an imperfect court is to improve it.

The answer is not to destroy it.

Universal Jurisdiction Is the Second Line of Defence

If the ICC is weakened, the answer is not despair.

The answer is to strengthen every remaining pathway to justice.

That means embracing universal jurisdiction.
The principle is simple:
Some crimes are so serious that any nation's courts may prosecute them, regardless of where they were committed or the nationality of the accused.

Torturers and war criminals should have no holiday homes.

No sanctuary cities.
No safe hospitals.
No safe airports.
No safe retirement.
This is not a theoretical idea.
It is already working.
The latest Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review documented 86 cases across 20 countries.

Sweden has handed down a life sentence for war crimes committed at Syria's Yarmouk camp.

A Chilean appeals court has recognised its authority to hear a case concerning alleged war crimes in Gaza.

Hissène Habré, who terrorised Chad for years, was ultimately convicted on African soil by an African tribunal because African lawyers, survivors, and activists refused to let impunity become permanent.

Each of these cases proves the same point:
When courts act, the wall of impunity cracks.

That is why I say to every government that claims to believe in the rule of law:

Pass strong universal jurisdiction laws.
Fund prosecutors.
Train investigators.
Preserve evidence.
And do not allow intimidation from powerful states to narrow those laws.

What I Am Demanding

1. Revoke the Sanctions Against the ICC

Every sanction imposed on the International Criminal Court, its judges, prosecutors, and staff should be immediately and unconditionally withdrawn.

States Parties have already condemned these measures.

Now they must defend the institution with the same courage they showed in their statements.

2. Protect the Court's Operations

The 125 States Parties must remain committed, pay their assessed contributions, and actively protect the Court's banking, communications, and technological infrastructure.

The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other partners should adopt protective measures that prevent private companies from being compelled to assist efforts designed to cripple a court of law.

3. Protect Those Who Cooperate With the Court

Lawyers, investigators, journalists, whistle-blowers, survivors, and victims' organisations must be protected.

A sanction that frightens a witness into silence is a sanction on justice itself.

A threat against an investigator is a threat against the truth.

4. Reject Deals That Trade Away Accountability

African governments must resist pressure, incentives, and side agreements that seek to exchange Rome Statute commitments for minerals, military cooperation, or political favour.

No nation's sovereignty is strengthened by making its own citizens easier to massacre without consequence.

Justice is not a bargaining chip.

5. Make Public Pressure Impossible to Ignore

To every ordinary citizen in Accra, Kumasi, London, Toronto, Berlin, New York, and beyond:

Make noise.
Write to your parliament.
Question your candidates.
Support organisations documenting atrocities.

Attend public forums.
Share verified evidence.
Governments move when silence becomes expensive.

The Last Word

History has watched this story unfold before.

Powerful men have always argued that accountability is dangerous.

They have always said that courts are political.

That justice is inconvenient.
That victims must wait.
Critics said similar things about Nuremberg.
They said it about sanctions against apartheid.

They said it about every tribunal that dared to ask a general, a minister, or a president to answer for bloodshed.

But the truth does not need a visa.
It does not require a bank account.
And it does not ask permission from the powerful.

Survivors will continue to speak.
Evidence will continue to be gathered.
And somewhere, somehow, courts will continue opening their doors.

I will not be quiet.
And I am asking you not to be quiet either.
Because a world where only the weak face judgment is not a world governed by law.

It is a world governed by fear.
Defend the ICC. Defend universal jurisdiction. Defend the right of every victim to be heard.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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