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MARJAN AJEVSKI
to be judges at the ICC.”” Consequently, “the actions of the Presidency can have a
significant impact on the immediate future of newly-elected Judges.” The Report
noted that the “practice of candidates campaigning and offering inducements to
vote for them, such as the exercise of these responsibilities in a particular way,
has been a feature of recent elections for posts in the Presidency.’™ This is a good
avenue for the senior judges to influence the incoming judges and, consequently,
compromising their impartiality and independence by giving them more resources
or more prestigious cases or job titles, or assigning them to easier workloads.
Furthermore, looking at issues of the independence of an international court
is not just about looking at whether the individual judges are independent.” The
working environment for the administrative staff assisting the judges is also
important. For example, the group of experts received information that “acts of
bullying and harassment by a slender number of Judges, past and present”?f have
occurred. Conversely, “[t]here have also been a number of incidents involving
staff members’ inappropriate behaviour towards Judges.”*’ Moreover, “there is
a perception from staff that individuals who officially complain may still bear
a personal risk and the repercussions, including possible reprisals for a staff
member, if publicly known, stand very high.””® Furthermore, there is this damning
paragraph in the Report
The Experts heard many accounts of bullying behavior amounting to harassment in all
Organs of the Court, though particularly in the OTP. They also heard frequent complaints
that the culture of the Court’s workplace was adversarial and implicitly discriminatory
against women. They heard a number of accounts of sexual harassment, notably unin¬
vited and unwanted sexual advances from more senior male staff to their female subor¬
dinates. Female interns seemed to be particularly vulnerable to such approaches |...].”
It is easy to see how this type of an environment can impact a court’s independence.
If the staff assisting the work of the judges is in a vulnerable position, if legitimate
22 The Report, para. 404.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid para. 405.
°5 For e.g. in 2017, documents surfaced that the former Chief Prosecutor of the ICC was
a paid consultant of a Libyan businessman that was connected to a militia group that
may have committed war crimes, Barney Thompson, Former ICC Prosecutor in Row Over
Lucrative Consultancy Work, Financial Times (6 October 2017), https://www.ft.com/
content/313526a8-a9d8-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97.
26 The Report, para. 298.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid, para. 287.
29 Ibid, para. 209.
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