Mr Khan has strenuously denied any wrongdoing or having a sexual relationship with the female staffer who made the allegations. The members of the court, which has the power to investigate and prosecute people for the most serious war crimes and crimes against humanity, may have wished to draw a line under a scandal that has damaged the credibility of the ICC since 2024, when the allegations first emerged. “The proceedings had reached a point where it was really problematic for the institution for him to continue, whatever the merits or demerits of the claim,” says Stephen Pomper, who held the ICC portfolio under Barack Obama. But the court’s members are likely to be disappointed again if they hope that Mr Khan’s firing will turn things around. It is unlikely to tackle the deep troubles facing the court, including American sanctions against some of its staff and a recent threat by Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary”. Critics of Mr Khan’s treatment argue that he was removed because he had put the court on a collision course with America when he issued arrest warrants for Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and Yoav Gallant, its then defence minister, over their actions during the war in Gaza. There is no evidence backing this claim. The court’s Palestinian representative explicitly rejects it, saying Mr Khan’s removal “was not a political proxy vote on any situation before the ICC”. Nonetheless, the prosecutor’s dismissal will harden views in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, that the court is more willing to bring cases against their citizens than against those of powerful countries. They are not wrong. The ICC, aware that it has no police or army to enforce its judgments, has always been careful not to antagonise powerful countries. In 2019 its judges rejected the chief prosecutor’s request to investigate alleged American war crimes in Afghanistan, arguing that it “would not serve the interests of justice”. (America has never signed up to the ICC.) A wiser prosecutor might have better navigated the delicate balance between the principles of universal justice and the messy world of great-power politics. What the court needs is an unflashy and competent prosecutor who can focus on cases with the best chance of success, says Sabine Nölke, a
retired Canadian diplomat who was the head of the selection committee that initially rejected Mr Khan for failing to meet these criteria. Instead, the ICC’s members have arguably been dazzled by self-promoters. “That needs to change,” she says. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/30/the-international- criminal-court-puts-its-house-in-order
Middle East & Africa | A new high West Africa has become a huge cocaine-trading hub Scrutiny of other routes has changed traffickers’ strategy for shipping to
Jul 30th 2026 On July 21st Liberian police raided a bungalow in Duazon, a town between Monrovia, the capital, and its airport. Inside they found two men and hundreds of packages of white powder that were stacked up to the ceiling. They arrested the men, a Serbian and a Spanish-Colombian, and confiscated the packages. After two days of counting and testing they said they had seized nearly four tonnes of high-grade cocaine with a street value of around $317m (the wholesale value in Europe is lower at €50m-60m, or $57m- 68m).
It was not even the biggest cocaine haul in Africa this year. In May a ship flying the flag of the Comoros islands was intercepted off the coast of Western Sahara carrying almost 31 tonnes of the drug, more than the 30 seized in west Africa in all of 2025. Between 2019 and 2025 the volume of cocaine seized in the region each year increased by 50%. The size of seized shipments has gone up, too: in 2025 the average haul on routes from the region weighed 5.6 tonnes, compared with 2.4 in 2024. In a few years, west Africa has become one of the biggest hubs sending cocaine to Europe. The region has long been a convenient waypoint, about halfway between South America, where most cocaine is made, and Europe, where much of it is consumed (see map). Corruption and lousy policing have also helped. Jos Leijdekkers, a Dutch national and one of Europe’s most wanted drug traffickers, who is meant to be serving 24 years in a Dutch prison, is reportedly running a large trafficking network from Sierra Leone. The Netherlands has requested his extradition, to no avail. In recent years a boom in cocaine production, increased policing in Europe of shipments from South America and technological innovations by traffickers have increased both the amount of cocaine routed through the region and the number of countries implicated in the trade.
Traffickers now bulk-ship cocaine from South America to west Africa, where port controls are relatively weak. There, shipments are repackaged and loaded onto large “mother vessels”, before being moved to smaller high- speed boats known as “go-fasts” that hover around north Africa and the Canary Islands or on the high seas. The boats are too fast for most navies to intercept safely. They bypass European ports for beaches and makeshift jetties. Though the increasing number of successful drug busts suggests authorities have got better at intercepting the traffic, much still slips through the net. The EU’s Maritime Analysis and Information Centre (Narcotics) (MAOC-N), an enforcement body, reckons that over 100 tonnes of cocaine successfully made it from west Africa to European customers last year. The region has become particularly attractive as a hub because European countries have cracked down hard on direct imports from countries such as Brazil, Guyana and Suriname, says Paulo Silva of MAOC-N. “It creates two points of departure which makes it much harder for us in Europe,” he says. “You cannot possibly go through everything coming from west Africa.” For drug traffickers, the route presents a “lower risk of disruption and seizure, which overall makes it cheaper”, says Lucia Bird of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, an NGO. The expansion of legal trade around the region is also helping the illegal sort. Ports, airports and land borders handle more cargo than they used to, so larger vessels carrying more drugs are easier to disguise. A former boss of Liberia’s Drug Enforcement Agency believes most cocaine enters the country by road from Sierra Leone, labelled as frozen food. Kingpins from the Balkans to Brazil can monitor in real time when containers are being loaded at port or transferred out at sea. Police involved in the Duazon raid found a Starlink router, a diving suit and waterproof GPS trackers that they suspect were used to keep the traffickers’ bosses in the loop. Compared with previous decades, when the drug trade was centred in a handful of weak states such as The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, it is increasingly pulling in other countries, partly thanks to Mr Leijdekkers. His presence in Sierra Leone means shipments from there now draw extra scrutiny from European authorities, prompting diversification to Ghana, Ivory Coast and Liberia. A 238kg shipment of cocaine (street value $19.2m) seized at Monrovia’s airport in June has been linked to the Dutch
trafficker. Authorities in Ghana and the Netherlands say a 4.5-tonne haul originating in Ghana that was recently seized in Amsterdam was also moved by his network. Despite the great fanfare accompanying each drug bust, west African countries are largely powerless to stop the thriving trade. Modern security technology is too expensive to employ widely at ports, airports and on the high seas. “We still do this 1940s style of security,” laments one activist in Monrovia. “Even sniffing dogs, we don’t have.” Scanners fail when there is no electricity. The perimeters of smaller airports are easily compromised. So are officials with puny salaries (in Liberia some are paid barely $100 a month). “We have state actors that we’ve identified have been working with the cartel. We have officers that have been charged,” says Gregory Coleman, Liberia’s inspector-general of police. In Sierra Leone, Mr Leijdekkers seems to have successfully swayed the entire state. Cocaine demand in Europe continues to rise. For the cartels, the occasional bust is merely the cost of doing business. ■ Sign up to the Analysing Africa, a weekly newsletter that keeps you in the loop about the world’s youngest—and least understood—continent. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/28/west-africa-has-become- a-huge-cocaine-trading-hub
Middle East & Africa | Furry friends once more Why Rwandans are warming to dogs Shunned after the genocide, they have become a status symbol Jul 30th 2026 For many years dogs were loathed in Rwanda. Rwandans turned against them after the genocide in 1994, when Hutu militias killed between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis, Twa and moderate Hutus. Stray dogs ate the bodies. Tutsi rebels led by Paul Kagame, now the president, shot the dogs as they took control of the country. But the image of canines gorging on corpses stayed with many people. More than 30 years on, dogs are still not universally popular. Alidry Ineza has been chased with a knife, shouted at and called a mzungu (Swahili for white person, though he is black), simply because he owns 12 of them. Yet attitudes are changing. Based in Kigali, the capital, Mr Ineza is one of Rwanda’s best-known dog trainers. His company, Paws and Hands, offers