On June 17, 2022, the International Criminal Court Presidency presented to the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) a shortlist of 12 candidates for the job of ICC Registrar. The shortlist was prepared in consultation with the ICC judges after 88 individuals presented their applications.
On October 10, 2022, the President of the ICC, Judge Piotr Hofmański, informed the ASP President, Silvia Fernández de Gurmendi, that Amady Ba (Senegal) and Kate Mackintosh (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) had withdrawn their candidature for the position of Registrar.
The new Registrar will be elected by the judges, by an absolute majority and by secret ballot, in early 2023. The official will serve for a period of five years and will be responsible for the non-judicial aspects of the administration and servicing of the court.
The ASP, the annual meeting of ICC member states, will make recommendations on the next ICC Registrar at its gathering scheduled for December 2022. The role of the ASP in the election process is to provide a recommendation to the ICC judges.
The successful candidate will take over from Peter Edward Lewis, who was elected on March 28, 2018, and sworn in on April 17, 2018. Before joining the ICC, Lewis served as a Chief Executive of the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales between 2007 and 2016. His tenure at the ICC expires on April 16, 2023.
The court has had four registrars, three men and one woman, all nationals of the Western European and Other States Group.
Currently, the ICC’s top leaders – the President and the Prosecutor – are nationals of European countries. None is from Africa.
Here are the profiles of the 10 candidates.
1. Juan Pablo Albán Alencastro (Ecuador)
Albán has been an attorney for 23 years, working in the criminal and international law fields as an organisation officer, practitioner, scholar, national and international institutions expert adviser, and legal projects and office manager.
In 2021, he was elected as a member of the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances for a four-year term.
For over a decade he has served as a tenured professor of law at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador) Law School and since 2019 also as director of the Public Interest Clinics. He represented victims, both at the domestic and international levels, in high-profile constitutional, criminal, and human rights litigations.
He has previously served as part of the staff of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, directed the International Human Rights Clinic, and was an associate professor of law at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador.
He has been a member of the Temporary Council of the Judiciary of the Republic of Ecuador since 2018 and has served as a foreign expert of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace in Colombia since 2017.
From 1997 to 1998, he served as an adviser to the Vice Minister of Government of Ecuador.
Between 1999 and 2001, he was the director of the Criminal Area of the Free Clinic and the Human Rights Clinic of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador.
He was the principal specialist of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights from 2003 to 2010.
Albán holds a law degree from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and a Master’s degree in international human rights law from the University of Notre Dame Law School. He is currently developing his doctoral dissertation in international human rights law at the same university.
2. Fidelma Teresa Donlon (Ireland)
Donlon is the Registrar of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC), with experience as a senior manager at various criminal tribunals.
From 2010 to 2013, she served as Deputy Registrar of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and was also an adviser to the SCSL in 2008. She authored the expert report on, and designed, the Residual SCSL.
In 2004, she was appointed Deputy Registrar of the War Crimes, Organised Crime, Economic Crimes and Corruption Chambers of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where she managed the set-up of the chambers and the successful transfer of cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the start of trials at the new court.
Donlon was the head of the Criminal Institutions and Prosecutorial Reform Unit within the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she managed the establishment of the War Crimes and Organised Crimes Chambers of the BiH State Court and contributed to the national judicial reform strategy – working closely with the BiH government, donor states, and international organisations between 2002 to 2004.
She is a graduate of the University College of Dublin and the Law Society of Ireland. She holds a doctorate in law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland.
3. Luis Mariano Hermosillo Sosa (Mexico)
Hermosillo has been the Director General for Budget and Financial Resources at the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico since 2015.
He also serves as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the largest private pension fund in Mexico, where he advises on budget matters to the Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres, a government agency responsible for coordinating the implementation of the national policy on gender equality and the eradication of violence against women.
He has 21 years of experience as Director General of Programme Planning and Budget or equivalent positions in the Federal Government of Mexico, including 10 years in the Ministry of Economy, nine years in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and two years in the Ministry of Public Education.
He has served as Director of Administration and Finance of Afore XXI Banorte and Deputy General Director of Human Resources of Fundación Dondé Banco. Hermosillo has also served as the head of HR administration at Afore XXI Banorte and Fundación Dondé Banco.
For eight years, he served as one of the commissioners of the International Civil Service Commission of the UN.
He took part in the UN Climate Change Conference in 2010 in Cancun, Quintana Roo, as a representative from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that collaborated with the conference secretariat.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and a Master’s in Public Administration from the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública (INAP).
4. Pouraogo Julien Kouda (Burkina Faso)
Kouda was installed as the Chief Registrar of the Court of Cassation on June 19, 2019.
He had previously served as the Chief Clerk at the Dédougou High Court and at the Ouagadougou High Court.
He also took part in a UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a specialist in the administration of courts and tribunals.
He holds a diploma from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration et de Magistrature and a law degree from the University of Ouagadougou. He has a Master’s in International and Comparative Environmental Law from the University of Limoges in France.
5. Christian Mahr (Japan)
Mahr is a director of the Division of External Operations in the ICC Registry.
Since June 2016, Mahr has been overseeing the Registry’s functions in the areas of cooperation, external communication, protection of witnesses, and analysis. He also supervises the operations of all field offices of the ICC located in situation countries.
Prior to joining the ICC, Mahr was a senior legal officer and coordinator of the Border Control and Law Enforcement Working Group at the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), a special political mission of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
In 2005 Mahr led in designing, developing, and securing the endorsement of the Security Council members for the main assessment tools used by CTED to measure the implementation by the member states of Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001). The UNSC adopted Resolution 1373 on September 28, 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks in the United States of America on September 11, 2001.
For 10 years, he served with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Belarus, working in a variety of representative, legal, programmatic, and administrative functions.
Mahr holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of San Diego and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
He was also a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mahr is admitted to practise law in the United States.
6. Gabrielle Louise McIntyre (Australia)
Mclntyre is the chairperson of the Truth, Reconciliation and National Unity Commission in the Seychelles.
She is also the chairperson of the Women’s Initiative for Gender Justice.
She has previously served as the Chef de Cabinet to the President of both the ICTY and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).
Mclntyre has served as acting head of chambers for the ICTY since 2010 and was nominated to be a judge at the ICTY in 2013.
She has trained as an Office of Integral Oversight Services (OIOS) investigator to assist the Registrar of the IRMCT in the investigation of allegations of bullying and abuse of authority in the workplace.
She also served as an associate in the Supreme Court of South Australia and an adviser in the South Australian Attorney-General’s office.
She holds a degree in law, a graduate with honours from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and a Master’s in International Law from the University of Cambridge, England.
7. Rosette Muzigo-Morrison (Uganda)
Until recently, Muzigo-Morrison worked at the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC in The Hague.
She has 34 years of experience as a human rights lawyer and has worked in the SCSL registry and the ICTR in various capacities.
Between 2006 and 2008, she completed a special assignment with the SCSL, where she was responsible for the establishment of a sub-office for the prosecution of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, in The Netherlands.
Muzigo-Morrison is one of the longest-serving legal officers with the ICTR, which sought to charge and prosecute persons responsible for genocide or other humanitarian violations in Rwanda and its neighbouring states in 1994. Beginning in 1995, she worked with the tribunal in The Hague, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
From 2011-2012 she also served as a sexual violence investigator for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Commission of Inquiry on Libya.
In 2011, she returned to the University of Notre Dame to accept the Kroc Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
Between 2019 and 2021, she represented the ICC as an expert and trainer of trainers for a legal round table hosted by the Centre for Security Force Excellence, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This culminated in the publication of a training manual for intervention in crises. She has recently conducted training on investigating and prosecuting sexual and gender-based crimes for Ukrainian lawyers.
8. Ibrahim James Pam (Nigeria)
Pam has 32 years of experience in law, human rights, integrity, oversight and accountability, institutional governance, sustainable development, and international criminal justice.
He has served in the course of justice at national and international levels, particularly in countries across Africa that have borne the scars of mass atrocities, including Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Mali, Senegal, and Kenya.
He is currently the chairman of the Ad Hoc Advisory Panel on Workplace Culture for the Office of the Prosecutor.
Pam started his career in 1989 as a junior counsel at F.O. Fagbohungbe & Co. (Legal Practitioners) in Lagos and moved to Continental Merchant Bank Nigeria Plc, Lagos as a senior supervisor in 1991.
In 1995, he continued in the legal space and served as a senior counsel, special legal assistant, chief legal officer, and programmes coordinator at J Y Pam & Co., in Jos.
During his first presence at the ICC, he served as an analyst and investigator at the Office of the Prosecutor between 2005 and 2012.
He also served as a special legal assistant at the Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission in Nigeria, set up by the transitional justice mechanism to address the mass violations of human rights that occurred in Nigeria during the course of 30 years of military rule.
He served as the deputy head of the investigation team at the United Nations Mission in South Sudan. As an investigation team leader in the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, Pam participated in the largest UN investigation of sexual exploitation and abuse allegations, committed by United Nations peacekeepers.
Pam has also played a part in civil society campaigns for the domestication of the Rome Statute in his home country.
He is a law graduate of the University of Jos in 1988 and Nigerian Law School in 1989. He later attended the London School of Economics and Political Science.
9. Marie Inger Tuma (Sweden)
Tuma is a Swedish prosecutor with long-standing experience advocating for victims.
She served as a judge in war crime cases at the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Tuma has previously served as the Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law in Lund, Sweden, an institute that facilitates research in different areas of human rights and international humanitarian law.
She has served at the OTP at ICTY in The Hague, supporting the defence team to have access to material in investigations and/or trials as well as the facilities of the field office in Sarajevo.
10. Oswaldo Zavala Giler (Ecuador)
Giler has been the chief of the Budget Section at the ICC.
In 2010, he worked at the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), in the Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda, and on the efforts and discussions around the stocktaking exercises, including on victims and affected communities.
In 2012, he took part in efforts led by the Registrar’s office to issue a revised crosscutting victims strategy based on the results of the stocktaking exercise at the review conference.
Giler was involved in institutional discussions concerning the normative and structural mechanisms in the Registry and the court to enable effective and meaningful victims’ participation and their legal representation in 2015.
He served as the head of the ICC Liaison Office to the UN, coordinating with the UN in their support to cooperation requests from the defence.
He has served at the ICC for the past 16 years in different capacities, contributing to the non-judicial administration.
