Experts to vet aspiring ICC judges

In anticipation of International Criminal Court elections, civil society has tapped several independent experts to vet candidates.
Honored to say that among those serving on the Independent Panel on International Criminal Court Judicial Elections will be an IntLawGrrls alumna. She's Patricia M. Wald (below left), formerly Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia -- and, as demonstrated by prior IntLawGrrls posts, a leading proponent for the selection of exceptional judicial candidates.
Joining Judge Wald on the panel convened by the Coalition for the International Criminal Court will be another woman, Dr. Cecilia Medina Quiroga (below right), Co-Director of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Chile and former President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (prior posts).
Completing the panel are 3 men: Hans Corell (prior posts), former Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and Legal Counsel of the United Nations; Justice Richard Goldstone (prior posts), former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; and Judge O-Gon Kwon (prior post), ICTY Vice President and former Presiding Judge at the Daegu High Court in South Korea.
According to a CICC release, these independent experts will be tasked

to help fill a significant gap in the procedures – the lack of a competent, fair, independent assessment of whether the nominees actually fulfil the qualifications prescribed by the Rome Statute.

To do so, the experts will develop a vetting procedure like that some national bar associations use to evaluate domestic judicial candidates. Their yardstick will be Article 36(b) of the Rome Statute of the ICC, which states:

(a) The judges shall be chosen from among persons of high moral character, impartiality and integrity who possess the qualifications required in their respective States for appointment to the highest judicial offices.
(b) Every candidate for election to the Court shall:
(i) Have established competence in criminal law and procedure, and the necessary relevant experience, whether as judge, prosecutor, advocate or in other similar capacity, in criminal proceedings; or
(ii) Have established competence in relevant areas of international law such as international humanitarian law and the law of human rights, and extensive experience in a professional legal capacity which is of relevance to the judicial work of the Court;
(c) Every candidate for election to the Court shall have an excellent knowledge of and be fluent in at least one of the working languages of the Court.

ICC States Parties are expected this year to put forward candidates for election by the ICC Assembly of States Parties, given that the 9-year terms of 6 ICC judges will expire in March 2012.

On January 16

On this day in ...
... 1979 (30 years ago today), after months of civil protest, Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his wife, Empress Farah, fled, heading by plane from Tehran to Aswan, Egypt. Pahlavi, whose lavish lifestyle's evident in this 1967 photo of the couple's coronation (credit), would die in the latter country the following year -- even as the austere Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consolidated power in Iran.
... 2002, at Freetown, Sierra Leone's Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Solomon E. Berewa, and the United Nations' Under Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, Hans Corell, signed the Agreement on the Establishment of a Special Court for Sierra Leone, thus paving the way to adjudicated charges against

persons who bear the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law committed in the territory of Sierra Leone since 30 November 1996.

IntLawGrrls' prior posts respecting this hybrid tribunal are here; among my publications on same is this article. The Special Court's website details its accomplishments to date: it reports that 2 cases (Civil Defence Forces and Armed Forces Revolutionary Council) "have been completed, including appeals," at the courthouse in Freetown. As for the Revolutionary United Front case, also tried in Freetown, "[t]estimony ... is complete, and a Trial Judgement is expected later this year." Finally, "[t]he trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor is in the Prosecution phase at The Hague." The court also considered some other matters, and it withdrew 3 indictments on account of the deaths of the defendants, Foday Sankoh, Sam Bockarie, and Johnny Paul Koroma.

Toward a crimes against humanity treaty

A 2-year project to study the international law regarding crimes against humanity and to draft a multilateral treaty condemning and prohibiting such crimes has been launched by the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. The project's the brainchild of our colleague Leila Nadya Sadat (right), Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and Director of the Harris Institute, which is named after one of the American prosecutors before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which tried Nazi war criminals after World War II. As international criminal law aficionados well know, the crime against humanity was one of the 3 crimes set out in the tribunal's London Charter.
Prompting this new move toward a comprehensive international response to crimes against humanity are a number of developments:
► Broad international support for the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which includes crimes against humanity among the offenses within the ICC's jurisdiction;
► Discussions among members of the U.S. Congress of criminal sanctions for crimes against humanity; and
► The considerable body of jurisprudence that various international criminal tribunals have produced in the last decade.
Sadat chairs the project's steering committee. Another member, DePaul University Law Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni, has agreed to chair the treaty drafting committee. Also on the steering committee are Hans Corell, former U.N. Under-Secretary for Legal Affairs; Richard Goldstone, former Justice of the South African Constitutional Court and former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and for the Former Yugoslavia; Juan Méndez, President of the International Center for Transitional Justice and former President of the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights; William Schabas, Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway; and Judge Christine Van Den Wyngaert (below left) of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
The steering committee plans to invite leading scholars and jurists to participate in an April 2009 Experts Roundtable, at which research on specific substantive and procedural aspects of the draft convention will be presented. The project will culminate with a global conference on crimes against humanity, at which the draft convention will be discussed.