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Luis Moreno-Ocampo
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Luis Moreno-Ocampo (born 4 June 1952) is an Argentine lawyer who has been the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 16 June 2003. He previously worked as a prosecutor in Argentina, famously combating corruption and prosecuting human rights abuses by senior military officials. He has also lectured in criminal law and practiced law privately.
no-Ocampo graduated from the University of Buenos Aires Law School in 1978, and from 1980 to 1984 he worked as a law clerk in the office of the Solicitor General.
From 1984 to 1992, Moreno-Ocampo worked as a prosecutor in Argentina.
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Encyclopedia
Luis Moreno-Ocampo (born 4 June 1952) is an Argentine lawyer who has been the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 16 June 2003. He previously worked as a prosecutor in Argentina, famously combating corruption and prosecuting human rights abuses by senior military officials. He has also lectured in criminal law and practiced law privately.
Career in Argentina
Moreno-Ocampo graduated from the University of Buenos Aires Law School in 1978, and from 1980 to 1984 he worked as a law clerk in the office of the Solicitor General.
From 1984 to 1992, Moreno-Ocampo worked as a prosecutor in Argentina. He first came to public attention in 1985, as Assistant Prosecutor in the "Trial of the Juntas"—the first time since the Nuremberg Trials that senior military commanders were prosecuted for mass killings. Nine senior commanders, including three former heads of state, were prosecuted and five of them were convicted. He served as District Attorney for the Federal Circuit of the City of Buenos Aires from 1987 to 1992, during which time he prosecuted the military commanders responsible for the Falklands War, the leaders of two military rebellions, and dozens of high-profile corruption cases. In 1987, he helped United States prosecutors extradite General Guillermo Suárez Mason to Argentina.
He resigned as a prosecutor in 1992 and established a private law firm, Moreno-Ocampo & Wortman Jofre. He defended several controversial figures, including Diego Maradona, former economics minister Domingo Cavallo, and a priest accused of sexually abusing minors. He represented the victims in extradition proceedings against Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke, and also in the trial of the murderer of Chilean General Carlos Prats.
During this time, he was also an Associate Professor of criminal law at the University of Buenos Aires and a visiting professor at Stanford University and Harvard Law School. He has acted as a consultant to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations. He is a former member of the advisory board of Transparency International and a former president of its Latin America and Caribbean office.
During the late 1990s, he starred in a reality television programme, Fórum, la corte del pueblo, in which he arbitrated private disputes.
The International Criminal Court
On 21 April 2003, Moreno-Ocampo was elected unopposed as the first Prosecutor of the new International Criminal Court. He was sworn in for a nine-year term on 16 June 2003. As of February 2009, he has opened investigations into four situations: Northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and Darfur. The court has issued public arrest warrants for twelve people; six of them remain free, two have died, and four are in custody.
The ICC's first trial, of Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga, was suspended on 13 June 2008 when the court ruled that the Prosecutor's refusal to disclose potentially exculpatory material had breached Lubanga's right to a fair trial. The Prosecutor had obtained the evidence from the United Nations and other sources on the condition of confidentiality, but the judges ruled that the Prosecutor had incorrectly applied the relevant provision of the Rome Statute and, as a consequence, "the trial process has been ruptured to such a degree that it is now impossible to piece together the constituent elements of a fair trial". On 2 July 2008, the court ordered Lubanga's release, on the grounds that "a fair trial of the accused is impossible, and the entire justification for his detention has been removed", but an Appeal Chamber agreed to keep him in custody while the Prosecutor appealed. By 18 November 2008, Moreno-Ocampo had agreed to make all the confidential information available to the court, so the Trial Chamber reversed its decision and ordered that the trial could go ahead, but Moreno-Ocampo was widely criticised for his actions.
He was also criticised for his decision in July 2008 to publicly charge Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Antonio Cassese, Rony Brauman and Alex de Waal argued that there was insufficient evidence to charge al-Bashir with genocide. Cassese, a former President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, had chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, which concluded in 2005 that the government of Sudan had not pursued a policy of genocide in Darfur. De Waal argued that "for nineteen years, President Bashir has sat on top of a government that has been responsible for incalculable crimes [...] Two weeks ago, Moreno Ocampo succeeded in accusing Bashir of the crime for which he is not guilty. That is a remarkable feat." Cassese also argued that if Moreno-Ocampo were serious about prosecuting al-Bashir, he should have issued a sealed request and asked the judges to issue a sealed arrest warrant, to be made public only once al-Bashir traveled abroad, instead of publicly requesting the warrant, allowing al-Bashir to avoid arrest simply by remaining in Sudan.
In October 2006 a media spokesman in the prosecutor’s office filed an internal complaint accusing Moreno-Ocampo of sexual misconduct. A panel of three ICC judges investigated the complaint and found that it was "manifestly unfounded" but Moreno-Ocampo generated a controversy when he summarily dismissed the staff member who made the complaint. The Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization subsequently awarded the employee almost £120,000 in damages, ruling that Moreno-Ocampo had breached due process and seriously infringed the employee's rights. The ILO held that the original complaint against Moreno-Ocampo had been made in good faith, and that Moreno-Ocampo should not have participated in the decision to fire the employee as he had a personal interest in the matter.
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