Nairobi has commanded its diplomats to lobby members of the UN Security Council to vote in favour of deferral of the cases preferred against six Kenyans by the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague.The six have been fingered by the court as masterminds of the political mayhem, pillaging and plunder that followed Kenya’s 2007 General Election in which more than 1,000 were killed and thousands more displaced.

Nairobi wants the cases halted for 12 months during which time, presumably, mechanisms for local tribunals to try the sextet and others facing lesser charges will have been put in place and Kenya, then, will take charge of the prosecutions.The cases preferred against the sextet by ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo have rattled Kenya’s wobbly governing coalition, split government along party lines and set the State against rights groups and internally displaced people.

Predictably, those opposed to trials in The Hague, among them President Kibaki and Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka, argue that the ICC process undermines Kenya’s sovereignty and lobbying UN Security Council members is part of taking Kenya back. It is hard to find an African country that readily embraces the ICC process. Indeed, the African Union has been hostile to ICC since the court indicted Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, which move the Union saw as undermining Khartoum’s sovereignty.

Dr Jean Ping, the chairman of the AU Secretariat, told DEA last August that the Union was not against the ICC for petty reasons but that it was against the Court’s approach to conflict situations in Africa. Ping accused the ICC of double standards and dared Ocampo to go get al-Bashir.

In other words, Ping was saying AU member states would not be party to arresting al-Bashir and that the Union is better placed to investigate its members than is the ICC. The AU, of course, voted in January to back Kenya’s bid for deferral of the cases against the Ocampo Six. What emerges is that while 30 African countries are members of the ICC because they ratified the Rome Statute of their own volition, they are increasingly seeing the Court as inimical to their national interests and would rather it was tamed one way or other.

The irony is that just as these countries signed of their own accord, they are not coerced into taking their nationals — presidents or ministers or rogue soldiers — to the ICC. The rules governing arraignment at The Hague are very clear.In Kenya’s case, Nairobi knew it was supposed to form judicial tribunals to try the suspected masterminds of its post-election violence, but its attempts to establish such courts were thwarted by its own Parliament, which bluntly said it had no faith in the local justice system.

The ICC, therefore, did not invite itself into Kenya’s sordid electoral mess. By its failure to set up credible courts to try its suspects, Nairobi called in the ICC. It was only when Ocampo named his suspects that the burden Nairobi was carrying became apparent.We wish Kenya’s diplomats luck in swaying the UN Security Council Nairobi’s way. We advise that it will be a tough call indeed, because a single No vote from any one of the five permanent members will kill any hope of deferral of the cases against the Ocampo Six.

It is quite possible that China will be sympathetic to Kenya’s case, but Washington, through Ambassador Michael Ranneberger, has made it plain that it prefers trials at The Hague to a local process. London and Paris are likely to take a similar position.And Kenya’s diplomats will also need to convince Council members that the opinion polls which have regularly shown that Kenyans prefer The Hague trials are wrong and, of course, that The Hague trials are a threat to Kenya’s security.

As a journal we wish to ask one question: Suppose the cases are deferred, what mechanisms are in place to ensure that the evidence will not be tampered with or witnesses will not be harassed or intimidated or even killed? A lot can happen in 12 months! There are many issues the AU works itself into a rage about concerning the ICC, but sovereignty cannot be one of them. No Africans were coerced into joining the ICC.