ICC lacks transparency, says defence counsel

The International Criminal Court (ICC) lacks transparency in the conduct of it affairs, said ICC defence counsel, Caroline Buisman, yesterday, at the International Bar Association (IBA) conference in Washington DC, USA.

Buisman made the accusation at a session titled, Seventy years after the judgment at Nuremberg – has the US failed to support international justice at the ICC?

She alleged that the ICC had used untested evidence by anonymous sources to convict suspects. “There is no transparency whatsoever. And so, we don’t know how prosecutors at the ICC make their choices,” she said.

Buisman, who has been involved in two high-profile cases: the Katanga, involving 24-year-old Congolese warlord, Germain Katanga, convicted of war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and the Ruto case on post-election violence in Kenya, pointed out a pattern showing ICC approached easy targets, mainly Africans.

She said these targets were usually not chosen by the prosecutor’s office. Instead, there is reliance on other institutions such as NGO’s to carry out investigations.