“South Africa Ignores its Obligations to Justice,” trumpeted The Financial Times in an editorial headline on June 16, 2015.

The previous day, while South Africa’s high court was preparing a possible arrest warrant on behalf of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Sudan’s President Omar el-Bashir departed for home in his presidential plane from a South African military airport. He had attended a meeting of the African Union – a body which has long decried the ICC and which has gone to lengths to protect African leaders who have been accused of massively murdering their citizens and, as in the case of el-Bashir, of genocide.