The top judge on the panel which issued the controversial warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is a fellow African who has been a pioneer in advancing women’s legal rights.
Judge Akua Kuenyehia of Ghana was the presiding judge of “Pre-Trial Chamber I,” the panel of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which announced the decision on Wednesday to order Bashir’s arrest on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising out of the war in Darfur. The other judges were Judge Anita Ušacka of Latvia and Judge Sylvia Steiner of Brazil.
Kuenyehia is the first vice-president of the ICC, second in seniority to the court president, Judge Philippe Kirsch of Canada.
The eldest of six siblings, Kuenyehia was the daughter of a school principal. She has been quoted as having criticized her father for having been a polygamist.
She studied at the University of Ghana and at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. She was called to the bar in 1971, began work as a lawyer in 1972 and has served both as an academic and a practicing lawyer. She has taught on criminal law, international human rights law and public international law, and is also a specialist in gender law.
When appointed to the court in 2003, she was dean of law at the University of Ghana where she had lectured for seven years. She helped set up the country’s first legal aid centre for indigent women and through a women’s law group introduced training in legal literacy for West African women.
Kuenyehia is affiliated to a range of women’s organizations, including the group Women, Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF). Her children have established a foundation in her honour in Ghana which is committed to educating and empowering women.
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She has written in a greeting on the foundation’s website: “Through this foundation, there is a greater opportunity to provide higher education and training for… girls and I believe that in the long term the multiplier effect will be great. We will be creating a pool of young women who will carry the message of the usefulness of education to their communities and families and our country will be the richer for it.”
Kueyehehia has contributed to several publications and co-authored Women and Law in Sub-Saharan Africa (2003) with Cynthia Grant Bowman.
In the pre-trial division of the ICC, she is one of the judges who deals with the confirmation of charges and assessing evidence against accused persons. When she was re-nominated to the ICC after her first term, she said in a questionnaire that among the challenges the new court faced were “to establish its integrity, credibility and acceptability in the face of the misgivings on the part of some of the comity of states.”
She added: “I think that by maintaining an objective approach and focusing on the task of the Statute I shall be able to meet the expectation of fairness and impartiality.”
Her term ends in 2015.
