“I’ve had some elected leaders speak to me and be very blunt: ‘This court [the International Criminal Court] is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is what one senior leader told me.”

It’s hard to know what’s more extraordinary: yesterday’s announcement by International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan that he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, or the above admission, which he made on CNN the same day.

The plan to arrest senior Israeli leaders over the now seven-month-long destruction of Gaza, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant, takes both the court and the world itself into uncharted waters. Whichever leader made that statement to Khan, they weren’t totally wrong, as cynical as it is: for most of its two-decade-long history, the ICC really has been mostly a vehicle to go after tin-pot dictators in Africa and exact punishment on various villains and Western adversaries in the Global South.