2005-2008: Judge Fausto Pocar (Italy)
2003-2005: Judge Theodor Meron (USA)
1999-2003: Judge Claude Jorda (France)
1997-1999: Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (USA)
1993-1997: Judge Antonio Cassese (Italy)
Judge Fausto Pocar (Italy)
President of the ICTY from 2005 to 2008
Born: 1939, Milan, Italy
Italian law professor Fausto Pocar was the Tribunal’s President until 16 November 2008. He was elected to that position by his fellow judges on 17 November 2005. He had previously served as the Vice-President between March 2003 and November 2005. Judge Pocar has been a Tribunal judge since 1 February 2000, re-elected twice by the UN General Assembly in 2001 and 2005.
Judge Pocar is Professor of International Law at the Law Faculty of the University of Milan, where he has also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences and as the Vice-Rector. He is the author of numerous publications on International Law, including human rights and humanitarian law, Private International Law and European Law. He has lectured at The Hague Academy of International Law and is a member and treasurer of the Institut de Droit International, as well as a member of several other international law associations.
Judge Pocar has a long standing experience in UN activities, in particular in the field of human rights and humanitarian law. He has served for 16 years (1984-2000) as a member of the Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and has been its Chairman (1991-92) and Rapporteur (1989-90). Further, he was appointed Special Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for visits to Chechnya and the Russian Federation during the 1995-6 conflict.
He has also chaired the informal working group that drafted, within the Commission on Human Rights, the Declaration on the rights of people belonging to national or ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities, that was adopted in 1992 by the General Assembly. He has also been for a decade the Italian delegate to the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and its Legal Subcommittee.
Since his appointment to the ICTY, Judge Pocar has served first as a Judge in a Trial Chamber, where he sat on the first case concerned with rape as a crime against humanity, and later in the Appeals Chamber of the Tribunal, where he is still sitting. As a Judge of the Appeals Chamber, he is also a Judge of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). On appeal, he has participated in the adoption of the final judgments in several ICTY and ICTR cases, heard both at The Hague and in Arusha, Tanzania.
Judge Theodor Meron (USA)
President of the ICTY from 2003 to 2005
Born: 28 April 1930, Kalisz, Poland
Judge Theodor Meron of the United States of America joined the Tribunal in November 2001. Immediately assigned to the Appeals Chamber, Judge Meron has heard numerous cases from both the ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). In February 2003, his fellow judges elected him President of the ICTY, and he remained in that position until November 2005. Since then he has continued to serve as a judge in the ICTY Appeals Chamber.
Judge Meron received his legal education at the Universities of Jerusalem, Harvard (where he received his doctorate), and Cambridge. Since 1977, he has been a Professor of international law and, since 1994, the holder of the Charles L. Denison Chair at New York University Law School. He was also Professor of international law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard and at the University of California, Berkeley. He has lectured at many universities and other academic institutions.
A leading scholar of international humanitarian, human rights, and international criminal law, Judge Meron wrote some of the books and articles that helped build the legal foundations for international criminal tribunals. A Shakespeare enthusiast, he has also written articles and books on the laws of war and chivalry in Shakespeare’s historical plays. He was Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law (1993-98) and is now an honorary editor. He is a member of the Board of Editors of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law.
Judge Meron is a member of a number of distinguished professional bodies and associations, including the Institute of International Law (since 1997) and the US Council on Foreign Relations. He has served on the advisory committees or boards of several human rights organisations, including Americas Watch and the International League for Human Rights. He participated in the preparatory commission and the 1998 Rome Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC). Judge Meron has served on several committees of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and he leads the annual ICRC seminars for U.N. diplomats on international humanitarian law at NYU.
He received the 2005 Rule of Law Award of the International Bar Association, the Hudson Medal of the American Society of International Law for extraordinary contributions to international law and has been selected for the 2008 Haskins prize awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies to a distinguished humanist. In 2007 he received the Legion of Honour from France.
Judge Claude Jorda (France)
President of the ICTY from 1999 to 2003
Born: 1938, Bône, Algeria
Judge Claude Jorda of France served as the Tribunal’s President between November 1999 and February 2003. During his term in office, Judge Jorda initiated significant reforms towards a more efficient judicial process and contributed to plans for the Tribunal’s completion strategy.
Originally appointed a Tribunal judge in January 1994, he played an important role in the establishment and later the implementation of the entire spectrum of procedures at the ICTY. He presided over the Trial Chamber which accepted the first guilty plea entered by an accused and subsequently pronounced the first sentence imposed by the ICTY in the Erdemović case in 1996.
A French national, Judge Jorda was born in Algeria and graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Toulouse (1960), and the Barreau de Toulouse (1961) and the École Nationale de la Magistrature (1966). He joined the central Administration of the Ministry of Justice and, at the same time, taught at the School of Law at the University of Paris.
Between 1970 and 1985, Judge Jorda held managerial posts at the École Nationale de la Magistrature and the French Ministry of Justice. He was then appointed Chief Prosecutor at the Bordeaux Appeals Court, and promoted to Chief Prosecutor at the Paris Appeals Court in 1992, where he remained until his appointment to the ICTY.
In February 2003, Judge Jorda was one of the first 18 judges elected to the International Criminal Court (ICC). At the ICC he served as presiding judge in the first confirmation of charges in a case before that court. In 2007, he resigned from the ICC for reasons of permanent ill-health.
Judge Jorda has contributed to various specialist legal publications on human rights and international humanitarian law and has written extensively on the role of victims and on the development of international criminal law. A member of the Société Française de Droit International, Judge Jorda also participated in several judicial cooperation missions to Chile, Guatemala, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Algeria, Canada and Madagascar.
Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (USA)
President of the ICTY from 1997 to 1999
Born: 1942, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald of the United States was among the first eleven judges elected to the ICTY in 1993, and she presided over the Tribunal’s first trial in the Tadić case. In November 1997, she was elected President of the ICTY, a position she held until her departure from the Tribunal in 1999. During her tenure, she fought hard to improve the visibility of the ICTY, including in the region of the former Yugoslavia, by setting up the Tribunal’s Outreach Programme.
Raised in New York and New Jersey, she attended Boston University and Hunter College, and in 1966 she graduated first in her class at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C.
After her graduation, she went to work on civil rights cases for Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where she helped win the organisation's first major job discrimination case. In 1969, she set up a law firm in Houston, Texas with her then husband, and specialised in employment discrimination cases against major corporations and labor unions. She also taught law at the same time.
In 1979, Judge McDonald was nominated to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, as only the third African American woman to be appointed to the federal judiciary in the United States. In one of several high profile cases, despite death threats to herself and her family, she ruled in favor of Vietnamese fishermen who had sued the Ku Klux Klan for harassment and intimidation.
She resigned from the court in 1988 to resume private practice and the teaching of law.
Judge McDonald has received numerous awards, including the First Equal Justice Award from the National Bar Association, a nomination as Distinguished Alumni by Howard University, Ronald Brown International Law Award from the National Bar Association, election to the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame and the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans Award. Today she serves as a judge/arbitrator on the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague.
Judge Antonio Cassese (Italy)
President of the ICTY from 1993 to 1997
Born: 1937, Atripalda, Italy
Judge Antonio Cassese was the Tribunal’s first President, holding the position between 1993 and 1997. In those uncharted early years he was one of the key persons who won the necessary political and financial support for the Tribunal and turned it from a court on paper to a functioning international judicial institution. After his tenure as President, Judge Cassese continued to sit as a Tribunal judge until February 2000. He participated in all the landmark judgements and decision rendered by the Appeals Chamber during his time at the ICTY.
Professor of International Law at the University of Florence since 1975, Judge Cassese has published extensively on issues of international human rights and international criminal law. He is the author of International Law and International Criminal Law published by the Oxford University Press, the co-founder and co-editor of the European Journal of International Law, and founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Criminal Justice.
Judge Cassese has been granted Doctorates honoris causa by the Erasmus University at Rotterdam, Paris X University and the University of Geneva, and is a member of the Institut de Droit International. In 2002, he received the Grand Prix awarded by the Académie Universelle des Cultures, presided over by the Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, for "exceptional contribution to the protection of human rights in Europe and the world".
He was President of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (1989-1993) and Chairman of the Council of Europe Steering Committee for Human Rights (1987-1988). He has represented the Italian Government on many occasions at UN meetings on human rights and at the Geneva Diplomatic Conference on the Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflicts (1974-77).
In October 2004, Judge Cassese was appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to be the Chairperson for the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, to investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. The Commission’s findings and recommendations lead to the first referral of a situation by the UN Security Council to the International Criminal Court.
 |
 |
