Karl to be installed ICC judge today

TRINIDADIAN Queen’s Counsel Karl Hudson-Phillips will be installed today as one of the first 18 judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The ceremony will take place at the ICC’s headquarters in the Hague, Holland. There will be several Trinidadians present to witness the inauguration of the court — a court which received the backing of 89 countries. At the 44th session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, President Arthur NR Robinson, the then Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, called for the establishment of the ICC to deal with transnational crimes. Robinson arrived in the Hague yesterday morning to attend the inauguration ceremony later today. With him were his son David, Aide-de-Camp Major Anthony Phillip-Spencer, Lenore Dorset, executive assistant to the President, Special Assistant Napier Pillai, Debra Coryat, International Relations Officer and Professor Courtney Bartholomew, medical doctor. Minister of Foreign Affairs Knowlson Gift was also expected to arrive in Holland yesterday for the ceremony.

Hudson-Phillips, who took time off from the Dhanraj Singh murder trial in San Fernando, was elected a judge during voting in February in New York. The TT QC was also unable to appear in Port-of-Spain yesterday for the prosecution in the case against two former Government Ministers charged with offences arising out of the Piarco Airport Project. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will install the 18 judges at a ceremony to be televised worldwide. But Canadian Philioppe Kirch is among the leading candidates to take the job of President of the ICC. He is currently Canada’s Ambassador to Sweden. Nine of the judges will be full-time judges, while the others will operate part-time. Hudson-Phillips is expected to be a part-time judge.

Advocates say the court will at last provide a forum for punishing those accused of the most serious crimes against mankind, including genocide. But critics say it will become a tool for harassment, propaganda and politically motivated prosecutions, especially against Americans, given their extensive military and civilian presence abroad, and the anti-American climate that has intensified since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Bush administration removed the United States’ signature from the 1998 Rome Treaty establishing the court and adopted legislation empowering the president to use “all means necessary” to free Americans from the court’s custody. But 89 other countries are on board as the court enters a field of international jurisprudence that has been developing since the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War. The new court is modelled on the temporary tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, East Timor and Sierra Leone. Optimists say it may take two years before the court is ready to try its first case. It would need hundreds of staff members to handle a single case, yet it is starting out with a team of just 62, including judges. It is in a temporary building with no courtroom, detention cells, trial lawyers or enforcement arm to make arrests.