Top lawyers seek Ocampo’s job

Four senior lawyers are seen as early favourites in the race to succeed Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo at the International Criminal Court.

A new prosecutor will be named in the second week of December, an appointment that will be keenly watched as the new prosecutor will take over the two Kenyan cases in The Hague.

Informed sources say the four lawyers are the leading candidates among dozens of candidates in the race to take over from Mr Moreno-Ocampo.

International Criminal Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz, Mr Ocampo’s deputy Fatou Bensouda, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda prosecutor Hassan Jallow and former ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour are seen as the top picks.

Different reasons

Mr Brammertz and Ms Bensouda are said to enjoy frontrunner status within the search committee for very different reasons.

Ms Bensouda has the advantage of being an African, a woman and a Muslim. These factors have seen her touted as one of the strongest candidates considering some critics claim the ICC is hostile to Africa. Ms Bensouda is also described as an exceptionally gifted lawyer.

The biggest weakness in her application, though, is her association with Mr Ocampo’s time in office. Some critics say that Mr Ocampo has had an undistinguished record, and he has come under severe criticism for his love for publicity, which critics argue has detracted from the serious work of investigations.

This is how international criminal law lecturer Kevin Jon Heller describes Ms Bensouda:

“She’s brilliant, tough, fair and the reason that the OTP has not collapsed under the weight of Moreno-Ocampo’s incompetence,” he wrote on the law portal Opinio Juris. “She’s also inspiring, having broken though every glass ceiling imaginable in Gambia.”

Ms Bensouda will have to overcome the strong constituency of doubters within and outside the ICC who argue that it is vital that the institution achieves a clean break from the Moreno-Ocampo era.

The outgoing chief prosecutor is yet to win a conviction in The Hague.

The courtroom performances of his team have also come under fire with Francis Muthaura’s lawyer Karim Khan establishing himself as one of the prosecutor’s fiercest critics.

In the latest round of hearings Mr Khan demanded that the judges order an investigation into what he termed “prosecutorial misconduct” in handling the Kenya case and in the prosecution’s dealings with witnesses.

Another strong candidate is Mr Brammertz, a Belgian former professor of law at the University of Liège who is widely regarded as one of the most impressive figures in international law.

He speaks German, Dutch, French and English, and in his role as the chief prosecutor at ICTY, led the team that has assembled the cases against the ICTY’s most high profile suspects – former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic and military leader Ratko Mladic.

Mr Brammertz is seen as possibly the strongest candidate in the race. There are those who say that the ICC should not bend over backwards to pick someone from a developing country, but should be guided purely by merit.

However, to qualify for the position of chief prosecutor one must be nominated by their home state and it is not clear if Mr Brammertz has won the support of Belgium.

It is said that some in Belgium were unhappy at the manner in which Mr Brammertz resigned from his former position as deputy chief prosecutor to Mr Ocampo.

Been unhappy

It is thought that Mr Brammertz quit due to serious differences between him and Mr Ocampo.

He is said to have been unhappy with the chief prosecutor’s methods and was especially disgruntled over the decision of the ICC to take action against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and its failure to take similar action against the Ugandan army.

A scholar who studies the impact of the ICC’s work in Uganda and Libya, Mr Mark Kersten, says that it is unclear if at a time when the ICTY has its most high profile suspects in detention they will be willing to lose their chief prosecutor.

Another candidate in the running is Hassan Jallow who has been the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda since 2003. Mr Jallow is seen as a safe choice. He would be unlikely to shake up the office of the prosecutor too much.

However, Mr Jallow has two things against him. His relatively advanced age – he is 61 which means that he would be 70 at the end of his nine-year term in the OTP– and his nationality.

As a Gambian, Mr Jallow will be one in a crowded field of African candidates that have applied for the job. That list of applicants is said to include three Kenyans, although the Sunday Nation could not immediately establish their identities.

One of their own

If Africans do not succeed in pushing through one of their own, one of the Western candidates that has been touted as a potential replacement is the Canadian former chief prosecutor at ICTY.

Mr Kerster writes no other candidate “has been more involved with issues of justice, human rights and conflict than Arbour .... she is tough as nails and not overly worried about annoying state and non-state actors in the defence of principles and values. At the same time, Arbour is one of those rare characters, unlike Moreno-Ocampo, who don’t feel the need to be flashy or use unnecessarily high rhetoric in the way they go about their business.”

The next prosecutor will be elected by the 10th session of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.