We helped build the International Criminal Court. Now we are tearing at the fabric of our own legacy

On Monday, 2 November, the United Nations General Assembly adopted its annual resolution on the International Criminal Court by 93 votes to 13, with 36 abstentions. Trinidad and Tobago was among the abstentions. It was the first time the country had withheld its support since the Assembly began adopting the resolution in 2005.12

This year's text was not a courtesy. Resolution A/81/L.11 welcomed the Court's report, called on states to cooperate in arrests, the gathering of evidence and the enforcement of sentences, and condemned threats, attacks and interference against the Court, its personnel and those cooperating with it. The Court, the Assembly said, must be able to work “without intimidation”. The words were adopted on the day the Court's President addressed the Assembly by video, because she is under United States sanctions.114

For Trinidad and Tobago, the vote carries a weight it cannot carry for most of the other 35 abstainers. This country did not merely endorse the International Criminal Court. Through Arthur N. R. Robinson, we helped bring it into existence. Our contribution became part of the architecture of international criminal justice. The decision to abstain is consequently not just another diplomatic vote. It raises a fundamental question about whether we are retreating from the very principles we helped establish.

The court Port of Spain set in motion

Robinson's commitment predates his premiership by three decades. At Oxford in the 1950s, he and a fellow student, Robert Woetzel, resolved to revive the idea of a permanent tribunal for crimes against humanity, a concept that dated back to the League of Nations. In 1972 the two men set up the Foundation for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court.12 Speaking to students at the University of the West Indies in 1969, Robinson warned that “the world today is on a collision course with its own inhumanity and anything that rescues it from this course will have made the greatest contribution of our time.”7

In 1989, as Prime Minister, he put the question back before the United Nations. Trinidad and Tobago, supported by every CARICOM state, asked the General Assembly to consider an international criminal court with jurisdiction over drug trafficking and other transnational crime. The Assembly adopted the resulting resolution, 44/39, by consensus on 4 December 1989. The International Law Commission's draft statute of 1994 became the basis for the negotiations that followed.101121

The drug-trafficking focus did not survive those negotiations. The wars in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda moved the emphasis to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression. The Rome Statute was adopted on 17 July 1998 and entered into force on 1 July 2002.21 Robinson described his own part plainly two months before Rome: as Prime Minister he had “raised and succeeded in revitalising the issue of the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court and having it placed on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly”.7

Trinidad and Tobago then acted on its words. It ratified the Rome Statute on 6 April 1999, the second state in the world to do so, after Senegal. It publicly rejected a bilateral immunity agreement offered by the United States. It supplied one of the Court's first judges, Karl Hudson-Phillips, elected in 2003, and in February 2006 became the first Caribbean state to enact comprehensive implementing legislation, the International Criminal Court Act.9

Robinson stayed with the institution after it opened. In 2006 he was elected to the board of the Court's Trust Fund for Victims.11 When he died in April 2014, the Court's President, Judge Sang-Hyun Song, told the state ecumenical service in Port of Spain that the new system of international criminal justice “most likely would not exist today, had it not been for President Robinson's vision, initiative and persistence”. The Court had named its first courtroom after him. “We can truly call Arthur Robinson the grandfather of the International Criminal Court,” Song said.6

William Pace, then convenor of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, was more direct still: “Without the initiatives of A.N.R. Robinson, I do not believe there would be a Rome Statute and an ICC.”11

Robinson, 18 May 1998 · two months before Rome

“Failure on the part of statesmen to render their support would be a major disaster in the development of human justice.”7

Four recorded votes, one direction

From 2005 to 2022 the annual resolution passed without a vote. Consensus broke in 2023, and the recorded votes since then trace a clear line. In 2023 Trinidad and Tobago sponsored the text and voted for it; it passed 115 to 6. In 2024 it passed 113 to 10, with Trinidad and Tobago and the United States both in favour. In 2025 the United States voted against. Trinidad and Tobago still voted yes, and the resolution passed 94 to 10. This year Washington voted no again, and Trinidad and Tobago moved from yes to abstention.23451

An abstention is a recorded decision. Governments that wish to avoid a question can stay out of the vote altogether, and dozens did in each of the previous three years: 41 states in 2023, 40 in 2024, 55 in 2025. Trinidad and Tobago was present, and chose not to say yes.345

In 2023 the country's delegate, Devita Abraham, used the same debate to invoke Robinson's warning that the world was on a collision course with its own inhumanity.27 This year the draft resolution circulated on 27 October with 54 sponsors. Belize was the only CARICOM state among them. Trinidad and Tobago was not on the list.20

A week of two firsts

The abstention came five days after another break with precedent. On 28 October Trinidad and Tobago voted against the annual resolution calling for an end to the United States embargo on Cuba. It had abstained when the resolution was first put in 1992 and voted in favour every year since, including 2025. It was the only CARICOM member to vote no. Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti abstained; the other members present voted yes.171819

The Prime Minister defended that vote in the language of freedom. “We cannot demand democracy and free and fair elections for ourselves and remain silent when those freedoms are denied for neighbouring citizens in neighbouring countries,” Kamla Persad-Bissessar told diplomats on 29 October.19 If that is the principle, the International Criminal Court is the institution built for the gravest denials of all: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

On the Court, no comparable explanation has been given. The Trinidad Express reported on 3 November that the Ministry of Foreign and CARICOM Affairs had yet to make any official statement on the abstention.2 In both votes Trinidad and Tobago moved toward the position of the United States, and in both it departed from a record of more than two decades. The Government may have reasons: concern about the reach of the Court's jurisdiction, about a small state's exposure to American sanctions, or about a security relationship with Washington that has deepened this year. It has not set them out.

A court under sanction

On 9 October the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court as an institution. They followed designations against thirteen of its judges and prosecutors. “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the measures a serious blow.131516

Addressing the Assembly on 2 November, President Tomoko Akane said nine of the Court's eighteen judges are now under sanctions “for nothing other than the performance of their independent judicial mandates”. Six states notified their withdrawal from the Rome Statute during the reporting year, and another has since taken steps to leave.14 The Court's own response to the sanctions placed the burden plainly: “Its fate now rests also in the hands of the States that created it.”13

Trinidad and Tobago is one of those states, and not in a figurative sense.

Robinson saw this coming

In August 2002, weeks after the Rome Statute entered into force, Robinson issued a statement on what he called “the United States administration's campaign against the International Criminal Court”. The Court, he said, was an institution “we must defend against all attacks in order to ensure the future of our children and of all mankind”.6

Four years earlier he had set out the conditions on which the Court's credibility would rest: a court “unfettered by the reality or perception of subordination to the will of a few states”, which would “never be a reality unless states agree to fund its operations and comply with its orders under all circumstances”.7

Those conditions are the test now facing every State Party, and they describe precisely what a small state stands to lose. Trinidad and Tobago has no navy capable of deterring a major power and no economy large enough to dictate terms. Its security and its standing depend on a system in which rules constrain the strong. The Court is one part of that system, and it is the part this country did most to create.

There are serious arguments about the Court: the reach of its jurisdiction over nationals of states that have not joined it, the pattern of its early cases, its dependence on governments that do not always cooperate. Delegations made those arguments in the General Assembly on 2 November.1 A founding state with concerns is better placed than almost any other to press them inside the system. An unexplained abstention leaves the concerns unstated and the record diminished.

The questions the Ministry must answer

The Ministry of Foreign and CARICOM Affairs owes the country a substantive explanation. What changed in the Government's assessment of the Court between November 2025 and November 2026? Did the sanctions, or any representation from Washington, inform the decision? Does Trinidad and Tobago still support the Court's independence and the cooperation the resolution asked of states? Does the Government intend to remain a State Party to the Rome Statute?

The former Foreign Affairs Minister, Dr Amery Browne, now in Opposition, has called the abstention “a devaluation of the legacy and work of ANR Robinson”.2 That legacy belongs to the country rather than to any party. It was begun by a National Alliance for Reconstruction Prime Minister, carried through by UNC and PNM governments, and honoured by the Court itself. An unexplained abstention puts that continuity at risk.

On 4 October 1990 Robinson stood at the General Assembly rostrum and said that “neither a free State nor a free world can long endure without adequate safeguards for the rule of law”. The photograph at the top of this page was taken that day.68

We helped weave justice, accountability and the rule of law into the fabric of the international order. The Court named its first courtroom after Arthur Robinson as a record of what Trinidad and Tobago gave the world. The question now is whether the country that produced him still has the independence and conviction to defend what he helped build.