It has been a banner year for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2011. In August, the ICC heard closing statements in its first opened case. In the same month, an effort by the Kenyan government to protect some of its top politicians from prosecution by the ICC failed. This year, the U.N. Security Council took the unprecedented step of unanimously referring the Libya crisis to the ICC under the authority of the ICC’s Rome Statute Article 13(b). This is despite Libya’s status as a nonstate party to the Rome Statute and with all five permanent Security Council members — including China and the United States, two high-profile nonsignatories — voting in favor of referral. Observers have lauded the Libya episode as a watershed moment in the ICC’s developing legitimacy.

Indeed, the ICC appears to be evolving into a truly global institution. China and the United States, two titans who had stubbornly opposed the ICC, now at least tacitly acknowledge its importance. Meanwhile, states are contributing resources to the difficult work of locating and capturing international criminal suspects on the ground. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), France, and Belgium have released suspects to the ICC, and the United States has recently assisted African governments in their efforts to track down the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that continues to terrorize civilian communities in Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), and the DRC, in order to send its leadership to the ICC. These indications of state support are important because the ICC lacks its own law enforcement apparatus and must rely on police and security personnel from the international community to execute its arrest warrants.

However, the increasing influence of the ICC reflects a deepening commitment among many Western states despite greater reservations among the African countries whose enthusiasm had originally buoyed the ICC. While U.S. policy on the ICC moves “from hostility to positive engagement,” African support is gradually faltering. Comprising a majority of members in the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties (ASP), thirty-three of the African Union’s (AU) fifty-four member states are parties to the ICC’s governing Rome Statute, self-obligated to submit to the ICC’s jurisdiction and execute its arrest warrants. Eleven more AU member states have signed, but not yet ratified, the Rome Statute. Signatories are prohibited from taking steps that would defeat the object and purpose of the treaty. However, the AU has now resolved three times among its member states to refuse cooperation with ICC operations. Moreover, in 2010, the AU rebuffed the ICC’s request to open a liaison office in Addis Ababa, the AU base.

As the ICC looks to the future, it is clear that improved relations with African citizens and state governments should be a priority for strengthening its international work. So far the ICC has focused on prosecuting crimes committed in African countries, and as it deepens its work in Africa, active state cooperation in the arrest of suspects and in situation referral is crucial for the ICC’s success. Yet nearly ten years after the Rome Statute came into force, the ICC stands at a crossroads. In December 2011, the ASP will select a new chief prosecutor for the ICC by consensus (or otherwise turn to secret ballot), and one of the frontrunners is Fatou Bensouda, the current deputy prosecutor and the sole candidate endorsed by the AU. There is a case to be made that the selection of an African prosecutor with Ms. Bensouda’s pedigree — that of a formerly high-ranking legal officer of an AU member state — could positively impact the ICC’s African relations. While predictions on the impact of such an election are necessarily speculative, the potential benefits of a prosecutor from the continent have been largely unexamined. Indeed, the symbolism of an African prosecutor serving as chief legal officer and representative for the ICC would send a powerful message about the legitimacy of the ICC’s activity in Africa. The individual may also amplify voices of African communities whose support for the ICC has been drowned out by the ICC’s protracted interaction with the AU.