Sexism in Reporting on the ICC

I’ve been following the Kenyan confirmation hearing relatively closely, and I’ve continually found the reporting at allAfrica.com — which aggregates articles from numerous leading African newspapers — to provide extremely good coverage of the proceedings.  An article today from the Nairobi Star, however, caught my eye for all the wrong reasons (my emphasis):

A dissenting judge of the International Criminal Court Appeals Chamber who voted against dismissing Kenya’s appeal for admissibility of post-election violence cases says the pre-trial chamber rushed the decision on admissibility. Judge Anita Usacka, a Latvian, published her dissenting opinion yesterday.

She thought that too much weight was placed on expeditiousness of the proceedings to the expense of Kenya’s sovereign rights and principle of complementarity. She said despite Kenya’s plea for a few months to show additional proof of ongoing investigations, the pre-trial chamber judges led by Judge Ekaterina Trendafilova overlooked these and went on to issue a final decision on the matter within eight weeks of the filing.

She said Ekaterina‘s assertions that the proceedings needed to go ahead quickly were misplaced as suspects were neither in detention nor their right to be tried without undue delay will not have been compromised at the very stage “It must be concluded that the expeditiousness was unduly emphasized and given too much weight in the pretrial chambers, especially in comparison to appellant’s sovereign right to investigate and prosecute the case itself,” she said.

Anita also accused the pretrial chamber of not giving due regard to the fact that this was the first time such a challenge was being filed and that there were too many “uncertainties” on many legal issues not previously handled in the court’s jurisprudence. These included among other things definitions of a “case”, “investigations”, “prosecutions” among others and which the judge accused the pretrial chamber of unilaterally fixing meanings without giving parties chance to contribute.

At first I thought using a judge’s first name might simply be an unusual house style, so I did a quick google search and found this Nairobi Star article written by the same journalist (my emphasis):

In their separate filings at the court supplemented by oral presentations by their lawyers at an open court session presided over by Ekaterina Trendafilova, William Ruto, Joshua arap Sang and Henry Kosgey all argued they ought not to have any business at the Hague in the first place.

This plea was largely based on the dissenting opinion of judge Hans Peter Kaul earlier this year in which he refused to admit the case arguing the “state or organisational policy” threshold was not met.

Further, the defence of Ruto whose oral presentation was made by his lawyer David Hooper, announced intention to file a separate admissibility challenge away from the confirmation of hearing proceedings. Sang’s oral presentation was made by Katwa Kigen and Kosgey’s by George Oraro. “The defence submits that the dissenting Judge’s finding on this issue reflects the intention of the drafters of the Statute, the view of a majority of leading scholars, and the current status of customary international law,” Ruto’s and Sang’s joint submissions read.

During the March decision on which the three are basing their arguments, two of the judges including Ekaterina were satisfied that the “state or organisational policy” was met by stating that the organisation need not be a state entity but capable groups as well.

Kaul however insisted for a body to qualify to be pursuing organisational policy, it must have state-like characteristics which he found missing in the case against the three who were then not members of government.

So: male judges get their last name, while female judges get their first name.  That’s tacky — and it’s not limited to this journalist and this newspaper.  Here is an article from Kenya’s Daily Star (my emphasis):

On Tuesday, Judge [Daniel] Nsereko agreed with the Pre-Trial Chamber and Mr Moreno-Ocampo that there was no evidence that investigations against the suspects were ongoing.

“The Appeals Chamber does not consider that Kenya’s intended submissions would provide any new or additional information which would assist it in resolving the issue of the admissibility of the appeal,” he ruled.

The ruling means that the Ocampo Six now have to depend on their defence teams to convince the Pre-Trial Chamber that their clients were not the planners, financiers and executors of the poll chaos.

[snip]

Meanwhile, Judge Ekaterina Trendafilova, acting as a single judge on behalf of Pre-Trial Chamber II, on Tuesday rejected Mr Ruto’s request to skip part of confirmation of charges hearings.

Judge Ekaterina said should Mr Ruto decide to waive his right to be present during the entire hearing, he should submit a new written request to that effect. She said he should either choose to attend all sessions or skip all of them.

As I said, tacky.  I hope the two women judges — both of whom are exceptional — don’t have their clerks clip newspapers for them.