Durham International Criminal Court moot team wins award at world championships in The Hague
Durham Law School students’ first-ever participation in the International Criminal Court (ICC) Moot Court Competition was rewarded with a prize for the best written submission of its kind during the world championships of the tournament on 12-19 June in The Hague, Netherlands this year.
The Durham team received the commendation for Best Government Counsel Memorial, coming out on top of nearly 100 teams and over 550 participants from around the world in the competition, which is jointly organised by the International Bar Association and Leiden University’s Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies with the support of the ICC.
In conferring the award, Michael Scharf, the Associate Dean for Global Legal Studies at Case Western Reserve University and a figure who has been involved with numerous international criminal law cases and tribunals, stressed the extent to which real-life proceedings were often won or lost on the written submissions. The government arguments for which Durham won the prize were particularly difficult ones, requiring students to justify the presence of a state before a court concerned with trying individuals and to differentiate its pleadings from those used by the defence, which represented the same state’s president. Evaluators’ comments complimented the “superior level of legal scholarship,” the “sophisticated” and “cogent” approach to standing, the “comprehensive research” and the “innovative,” “ingenious and compelling” “original thought” in Durham’s award-winning memorial, which one called “evidence of a profound understanding of international criminal law.”
The Durham team included Jonas von Bronewski, an exchange student from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, second-year students Keira Chou, Chahat Garg, and Ethan Goh, and third-year student Matthew Lim, with assistance from others at earlier stages of the competition. Christopher Szabla, Assistant Professor in International Law, served as the team’s advisor and coach. During their time in The Hague students were also exposed to discussions among diplomats and officials about pressing issues in international criminal law such as the setting up of a new special tribunal on aggression concerning Ukraine and visited the premises of international organisations as well as those of the ICC itself.
