As the African Union celebrates its 50th anniversary, its position on the International Criminal Court (ICC) shows how little has changed from the bad old days when its members' fondness for looking after each other at the expense of their people earned it the nickname the "Dictators' Club."
Dictators are harder to find nowadays, but clubbable leaders are still commonplace. As a continental body the AU has in recent years become a more benign presence and has notched up some remarkable successes, notably in Somalia where its peacekeepers have had unprecedented success in pacifying a violently wayward nation.
But the AU complaint that the ICC is a racist institution hunting down Africans because of the color of their skin shows that prickliness and misplaced loyalty are not things of the past.
"The African leaders have to come to a consensus that the process the ICC is conducting in Africa has a flaw," said Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn at the AU summit in Addis Ababa at the weekend. "The intention was to avoid any kind of impunity, but now the process has degenerated into some kind of race hunting."
The ICC has indeed opened cases in eight countries, and every single one is in Africa.
But that's not the end of the story.
The governments of Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and Mali are all signatories of the Rome Statute, the legislation that established the court in 2002, making them member states. In a clear admission of their own inability to deliver justice, all four invited the prosecution to open investigations.
Nearly a third of current ICC member states are African.
In the case of Darfur, in Sudan, and Libya, neither of which are ICC member states, prosecutors were asked to investigate by the United Nations Security Council.
The African states of Benin and Tanzania were among the 11 in favor of the Darfur referral in 2005. Gabon, Nigeria and South Africa were among the countries that voted unanimously for the Libya referral in 2011.
In both Ivory Coast and Kenya, the office of the court's prosecutor opened investigations of its own volition. In Ivory Coast, the government of President Alassane Ouattara welcomed the investigation. In Kenya, it only began after Kenya's lawmakers failed repeatedly to set up a local tribunal, and after Kenya's police and judiciary failed to even begin investigations of their own.
