Election of the ICC Prosecutor: Here is your vote!
The result of the non-official vote organised by Justice Info on the sidelines of the upcoming International Criminal Court Prosecutor election is clear: British candidate Karim Khan is the big favourite of our readers with 34% of votes compared with 14 % for the second favourite, Fergal Gaynor of Ireland. Then come Spanish candidate Carlos Castresana Fernandez (12%), French candidate Brigitte Raynaud (10%), in joint position Canadians Robert Petit and Richard Roy (8% each), Ugandan Susan Okalany (7 %), Italian Francesco Lo Voi (5%) and finally US-Nigerian Morris Anyah (2%). This purely informative poll gathered 309 votes from an audience estimated to be mainly transitional justice experts, on five continents. Karim Khan came first on all continents except America which largely preferred Carlos Castresana Fernandez.
This article, initially published on 7 December (including a voting form open until 11 December) was updated on 14 December, when the results of your votes were announced.
The event only takes place every nine years. The third Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is to be appointed this month by the Assembly of States Parties meeting in New York. The election process has been chaotic and there is uncertainty as to who will be the winner. There are nine candidates to run for the post for the next nine years. Each of them was interviewed publicly. These hearings are available online on the ICC website. Justice Info believes it is important to understand the geographical origin and distribution of votes within its readership, which is made up of both experts and populations affected by the crimes dealt with by the future Prosecutor. We have therefore decided to give you a chance to vote.
The results of your votes
From Monday 7 to Friday 11 December, you voted for your favourite candidate. Thank you to all participants!
Here are the results synthesized in an infographic.
This people’s vote is unofficial. Only States Parties to the ICC have the right to vote. It is organised by secret ballot. Justice Info only knows two things from you: your choice of candidate and your geographical origin (if you mentioned it). Online voting was open from Monday 7 December to Friday 11 December at 12 noon (time zone: GMT+01.00 - Central European Time).
The 9 candidates
Below is a short biography of each of the candidates, prepared by our contributor in The Hague, Stéphanie Maupas.
Thierry Cruvellier is Editor-in-Chief of Justiceinfo.net. For more than 20 years, he has been covering trials for crimes against humanity and genocide, from Rwanda to Sierra Leone, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia or Senegal. Between 1990 and 1996, he regularly covered the war in Sierra Leone. He was also the representative of Reporters Without Borders in the Great Lakes region (1994-1995). He was editor-in-chief of the online journal International Justice Tribune and is an Op-ed contributor to The New York Times. In 2003 he received the prestigious fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He regularly teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He is the author of three books: Court of Remorse-Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Wisconsin University Press, 2010), The Master of Confessions (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2014), on the Khmer Rouge trials and Promised Land (Gallimard, 2018 not yet published in English), a story about the extraordinary endurance of the Sierra Leonean people over the last forty years.
Franck Petit is deputy editor-in-chief of JusticeInfo.net, Fondation Hirondelle’s online media dedicated to justice related to mass violence. Co-founder with Thierry Cruvellier of the online magazine International Justice Tribune, he directed it for five years, from 2004 to 2009. Since 1999, he has chronicled the trials of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He covered the International Criminal Court at its inception as well as many transitional justice issues. He has worked for Reporters Without Borders and has reported in France, Africa, the Caucasus and Turkey. As a consultant, he has worked for several international organizations, particularly in Central Africa and the Maghreb. For four years, he led the outreach team of the African Extraordinary Chambers (ACE), based in Dakar. In the Central African Republic, he supports the awareness-raising programme on the Special Criminal Court (SPC). In France, he is a member of the editorial board of Amnesty International’s Chronicle and of the Association de la presse judiciaire.
Sylvain Olivri is, since August 2018, the editorial webmaster and community manager of JusticeInfo.net. Versatile digital professional, he intervenes since the year 2000 on projects that go from the strategic and editorial conception, to the diffusion of contents (search engine optimization, advertising, community management...). He also deals with web design (ergonomics and graphics). Since 2016, Sylvain has pursued audit and consulting missions to formulate strategic recommendations and improve the website, its communication and its performances.
Golnouche K. Barzegar is a print and television journalist with degrees from Science Po Paris and Columbia University School of Journalism in New York. Barzegar has worked as a freelance journalist for various French and English-language media, including Le Nouvel Obs, Slate, The Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Al-Jazeera English and CBS News. Since 2006, she has also worked for the French-language TV channel TV5MONDE, specializing in Africa and with a particular interest in environmental justice issues.
Julia Crawford is a journalist and translator for JusticeInfo.net since June 2015. She is an experienced journalist, editor and journalism trainer, specialized in African affairs and transitional justice. She has previously worked for Radio France International in Paris, as editor of the Hirondelle News Agency in Arusha, Tanzania, for IRIN in Nairobi, the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York and BBC Media Action in London. Julia Crawford currently also works part-time as a news and feature writer for swissinfo.ch.
Thibaud Oberli has been Operations Manager at Fondation Hirondelle since May 2023. He is in charge of the cross-disciplinary "Violence Prevention and the Media" training project and supports the Fondation Hirondelle’s communications department. He previously worked as a sports journalist and editor for the French-language titles of TX Group, formerly Tamedia (24 Heures, la Tribune de Genève, 20 Minutes, lematin.ch), and as a freelancer for local radio station RTN. Thibaud Oberli holds a Master’s degree in African Studies from the University of Geneva and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Lausanne.
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