CASIN Delegate Jennifer Huang Reviews the 10th Session of the ASP to the Rome Statute of the ICC
As a Council for American Students In Negotiation (“CASIN”) student delegate, I had the honor of attending the tenth session of the Assembly of States Parties (“ASP”) to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”), which took place from 12–21 December 2011 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Representatives from each of the 120 ICC States Parties that have ratified the Rome Statute gathered to address and decide issues central to the Court’s operations.
All in all, it was a tremendous victory for women: on its first day alone, Estonian Ambassador Tiina Intelmann was elected as the new President of the Assembly of States Parties. I also had the luck of sitting only two rows behind Fatou Bensouda and witnessed firsthand the unanimous election of the new female Chief Prosecutor of the ICC. She graciously accepted the congratulations that began pouring in and was escorted out of the conference room by a large crowd of well-wishers. Ms. Bensouda’s election is significant in any number of ways. For one, her election benefits women the world over: she has pledged to prosecute sexual and gender crimes and has promised that she will ensure that the Office of the Prosecutor will work more closely with women’s organizations in the future, especially those in conflict countries, which often provide the sole support to women victims.
The Prosecutor-Elect also has a chance to finish the work she started as deputy under Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo, as she has yet to secure the ICC’s first conviction in her first case and is only just managing to wrap up the much-contested Thomas Lubanga Dyilo case.
But perhaps what will be most critically observed in the coming years is her ability to handle the African Union’s (“AU”) dissembling in terms of its support for the Court. From the Court’s inception, the AU’s stance has shifted from merely critical to sometimes openly hostile, heightened by the realization that all seven Situations currently being investigated are located within Africa. Despite the fact that three of these Situations have been self-referred, Africans claim a special prejudice against them and have steadfastly refused to cooperate in handing over President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, ticking years onto his outstanding arrest warrant. The Prosecutor-Elect, herself from Gambia, dismissed these notions earlier this year, stating that “[a]ny time I hear this about the ICC targeting Africa…it saddens me, especially as an African woman. . . All of the victims in our cases in Africa are African victims…they’re the ones who are suffering these crimes.” Her Gambian nationality may make it harder for these accusations to stick, and, in fact, the Assembly of States Parties stated as much in acknowledging that there was “pervasive sentiment that the next prosecutor should come from Africa.”
On 12-16 December 2011 after 15 rounds, the ASP elected six new judges: Miriam Defensor-Santiago (the Philippines), Anthony Thomas Aquinas Carmona (Trinidad and Tobago), Robert Fremr (Czech Republic), Olga Venecia Herrera Carbuccia (Dominican Republic), Howard Morrison (United Kingdom) and Chile Eboe-Osuji (Nigeria). The two women judges will maintain the slight female majority, with ten women serving in the eighteen-strong 2012-2015 class on the ICC.
On 15 December 2011, in an afternoon panel on “International Crimes Against Children,” a young woman named Grace Akallo stole the spotlight, despite an all-star panel that featured Ms. Radhika Commaraswamy, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict; Silvana Arbia, Registrar of the ICC; Elisabeth Rehn, Director of the Board of the Trust Fund for Victims; and Brigid Inder, Executive Director of Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. In the crowded Dag Hammerskjold Auditorium, her simple but powerful words touched everyone. Ms. Akallo was abducted by Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (“LRA”) rebels at the age of fifteen, marched into southern Sudan, abused, and forced to commit atrocities against civilians and other captives. Despite this harrowing childhood, Ms. Akallo returned to school, attended college in the United States and serves as a spokesperson and peace activist with World Vision, a Ugandan Christian relief and development organization, sharing her personal experiences with the world.
For all but the few who work directly with child-soldiers, speaking of the traumas faced by these victims and what the prospect of becoming an official victim or witness before the ICC entails becomes an exercise in the abstract, projecting imagined emotions and fears on individuals whose lives rarely resemble our own. Ms. Akalla, well-spoken and self-assured, brought into stark relief the fractured and complicated lives of former child-soldiers, especially girl child-soldiers. With the practice of specific aid to child-soldiers being so new, relatively speaking, to the international community, Ms. Akalla emphasized that the special needs of girl child-soldiers, carrying “more burdens than boy child-soldiers,” have been overlooked. Some of those burdens include “war babies,” children borne of their former captors. These children make reintegration back into the village complex and returning to school difficult, if not impossible.
Despite a painfully laborious negotiations period, the session eventually concluded on 21 December 2012 with agreement on both an omnibus resolution on strengthening the ICC, as well as a 2012 program budget. The omnibus resolution included laying out the parameters of an independent oversight mechanism (“IOM”) for the Court, which objectors had feared would impinge upon the independence of the prosecutor. Hopes remain high that despite being saddled with a budget smaller than desired, the Court will continue with its revolutionary work. Recalling the President of Botswana Ian Khama’s keynote address at the start of the session, the Court has done quite well considering its short time in existence, its limited budget, and not yet universal support. He deemed the ICC a “mechanism within a larger international human effort” in the “human quest for global peace and security.” As the Court gains a new prosecutor, new parties, and heads into the New Year, the ICC faces challenges both new and old. Yet with its first decision on the horizon, the ICC has already demonstrated that the effort to end impunity is not a mere aspiration. With the collective support of States Parties, the Court can only make further inroads towards the realization of international peace and security.