ICC prosecutor pushes for genocide charges against Sudan’s president
July 7, 2009 (WASHINGTON) — The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno-Ocampo formally submitted an appeal yesterday to include genocide charges in the arrest warrant issued for Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir.
However, last March the majority at the Chamber (2 out of the 3 judges) said that there is not enough evidence to support charging Bashir with genocide.
In late June Ocampo was granted a “Leave to appeal” the Judges’ decision on one of the three grounds that he said were appealable.
Under the Rome Statute, the procedure is the a step before the actual appeal process and the party requesting it must prove that the decision they wish to challenge “involves an issue that would significantly affect the fair and expeditious conduct of the proceedings or the outcome of the trial”.
The prosecutor central argument is that the Rome Statute only requires the judges to affirm that there is “reasonable evidence” that an individual committed a certain crime for the issuance if an arrest warrant.
He suggests that the judges applied a higher threshold of evidentiary proof than required at this stage of the proceedings.
The other two grounds per the prosecutor’s application is “whether the majority considered specific extraneous factors in assessing the existence of reasonable grounds to establish genocidal intent” and “whether the Majority failed to consider both separately and collectively specific critical factors in assessing the existence of reasonable grounds to establish genocidal intent”.
However, the Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that only the issue of evidentiary threshold in examining the genocide charges put forward by the prosecutor can be presented before the five-member appeals chamber.
Since March 13th the appeal chamber included Judges’ Akua Kuenyehia from Ghana and Anita Usacka from Latvia who were part of Pre-Trial Chamber I that decided on the case against the Sudanese president.
However, on July 3rd both judges asked the ICC president to recuse them from sitting on this appeal for citing their previous involvement with the case.
The ICC presidency granted them their request and replaced them with Judge Ekaterina Trendafilova from Bulgaria and Judge Joyce Aluoch from Kenya.
Ocampo speaking from the Ethiopian capital today said that the appeals chamber decision could take several months.
The new development comes days after the African Union (AU) decided that its ICC members shall not cooperate with the court in arresting Bashir despite having an obligation to do so under the Rome Statute.
Botswana condemned the AU resolution, saying it was not properly discussed at the July summit chaired by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Ocampo said it is the individual countries that ratified the Rome Statute who will make the decision on arresting Bashir not the AU.
(ST)