Gender Report Card on the International Criminal ... - YWCA Canada

States Parties/ASP Elections 2011
nominated: 392 16 of them on list A and three on
list B; 17 of them male and two female; two of
them are from WEOG, five from GRULAC, two from
Eastern European States, eight from African States
and two from Asian States. 393
392 Rosolu John Bankole Thompson (Sierra Leone); Ajmi Bel Haj
Hamouda (Tunisia); Vinod Boolell (Mauritius); Modeste-
Martineau Bria (the CAR); Anthony Thomas Aquinas
Carmona (Trinidad and Tobago); Bruno Cathala (France);
Eduardo Cifuentes Muñoz (Colombia); Władysław Czaplinski ´
(Poland); Miriam Defensor-Santiago (Philippines); Chile
Eboe-Osuji (Nigeria); Robert Fremr (Czech Republic); Olga
Venecia Herrera Carbuccia (Dominican Republic); Gberdao
Gustave Kam (Burkina Faso); Javier Laynez Potisek (Mexico);
Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua (the DRC); Howard Morrison
(UK); Hamani Mounkaila Nouhou (Niger); George A
Serghides (Cyprus); and Jorge Antonio Urbina Ortega (Costa
Rica).
393 For this round of judicial elections, an Independent Panel on
ICC Judicial Elections, was established by the Coalition for
the International Criminal Court. The Panel was composed
of The Honourable Justice Richard Goldstone, former Chief
Prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunals for
Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, Chair; The Honourable
Patricia Wald, former Chief Judge of the United States Court
of Appeals for the District of Columbia and former Judge
of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, Vice-Chair; The Honourable Hans Corell, former
Judge of Appeal and former Under-Secretary-General for
Legal Affairs and the Legal Counsel of the United Nations;
Judge O-Gon Kwon, Judge and Vice President of the UN
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
and former Presiding Judge at the Daegu High Court; and
Dr Cecilia Medina Quiroga, Director of the Human Rights
Centre at the University of Chile and former Judge and
President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
The Panel’s mandate was to independently assess whether
each judicial candidate fulfils the qualifications prescribed
by Article 36 of the Rome Statute., On 26 October 2011, the
Panel released a ‘<strong>Report</strong> on International Criminal Court
Judicial Nominations 2011’. Unfortunately, the report
of the Panel provided a very limited assessment of each
candidate with regard to the provisions of Article 36, in
particular whether they met the specific requirements set
out in Article 36(3)(b), the so-called List A and List B criteria,
depending on which list the candidate’s government
designated in their nomination. The panel found that four of
the candidates were ‘not qualified’ for the list for which they
had been nominated, while the other 12 candidates were
designated ‘qualified’, without further comment or analysis.
As such, the expertise and experience represented by the
members of the Panel appears to have been applied in a
limited way. The Panel also made a number of observations
regarding the process of nomination and election and the
criteria for judicial candidates, suggesting that these at
some point be addressed by the ASP. The report of the Panel
is available at .
Any State Party to the Rome Statute can
nominate candidates for election to the Court,
either ‘[b]y the procedure for the nomination
of candidates for appointment to the highest
judicial offices in the State in question; or [b]y
the procedure provided for the nomination of
candidates for the International Court of Justice
in the Statute of that Court’. 394 Nominations
must be accompanied by a written note verbale
sent to the Assembly of States Parties by the
respective State Party setting out how the
candidate fulfils the requirements of Article 36.
Each State Party can nominate one candidate;
States can also nominate a national of another
State Party. 395
In addition to the general voting procedures,
Resolution ICC-ASP/3/Res.6 also sets out specific
minimum requirements with regards to the
number of judges of a particular region or
gender, as well as the number of judges from
each respective list (ie list A or list B experience)
on the bench, the so-called ‘minimum voting
requirements’. In the December 2011 election,
for the first time, the minimum voting
requirement regarding gender is zero for female
and two for male candidates. As noted above,
only two women have been nominated for the
December 2011 election.
394 Article 36(4)(a).
395 Article 36(4)(b).
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