23868 | Judiciary

Due to the volume of applications received, only successful applicants will be contacted by the Court.

This position is funded by the Trust Fund for the Development of Interns and Visiting Professionals, thanks to the generous contributions of donors such as the French Republic, as well as elected officials and staff of the ICC.

In order to be eligible for this funded internship position, all applicants must be nationals from Francophone countries that appear on the United Nations Statistics Division’s list of developing regions that are a State Party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, namely:

Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Seychelles, Vanuatu.

Some ICC States Parties are currently (as at 31 January 2025) not represented, or under-represented, and we therefore strongly encourage nationals from the following States Parties to apply:

Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Comoros, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mauritius, Niger, Seychelles, Vanuatu.

Required Documents for this Application

Please note that you will need to have the following information ready in order to complete your application:

• A completed “Duties and Responsibilities Form” (refer to step 1 on your eRecruitment Profile page).
• Motivation letter (maximum of 400 words).
• One reference letter.
• Scanned copies of university degrees and/or diplomas (to be added at the essay upload box).

Funding

This position is funded through the Trust Fund for the development of interns and visiting professionals, whereby the Court will provide the selected candidate a monthly remuneration of €1,500 (with a mandatory deduction for emergency health insurance) as well as some financial help for travel purposes for candidates who are not based in the Netherlands at the time of the recruitment. Please note that (i) costs associated with Visas are the responsibility of the selected candidate, (ii) due to the nature of the assignment, participants cannot bring their families with them.

Contract Duration

Visiting professionals are required to work full time for a period of six months.

The Opportunity

The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigates and, where warranted, tries individual charges with the gravest crimes of concerns to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crime of aggression. The Court is participating in the global fight to end impunity, and through the international criminal justice, the Court aims to hold those responsible accountable for their crimes and to help prevent the crimes from happening again. You can contribute to this cause by joining the ICC.

Organisational Context

Chambers, comprising three judicial divisions (Appeals Division, Trial Division and Pre-Trial Division), is responsible for judicial proceedings for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court.

Chambers is recruiting visiting professionals to support the Case Law Database (CLD) Project. The CLD Project is Court-wide undertaking that commenced in 2016 aimed at creating a uniform and consistent searchable database of the Court’s jurisprudence. To that end, the CLD team in Chambers extracts legal findings from the Court’s decisions and assign them keywords and other metadata (‘head-noting’), tracing the evolution of the Court’s jurisprudence. Nowadays, the CLD is available to the public at large in English, French and Spanish. The selected candidates will work within the CLD team in Chambers and contribute to the maintenance of the CLD under the supervision of the project’s Coordinator.

Duties and Responsibilities

As part of the ‘head-noting’ process and under the direct supervision of the CLD Coordinator, the visiting professionals will contribute to the head-noting process and maintenance of the CLD, which includes the following steps:

• Conduct and review in-depth legal analysis of the Court’s judgments, decisions and orders, identifying and extracting key legal findings and relative levels of jurisprudential importance;
• Identify relevant legal keywords for legal findings;
• Identify relationships between related judgments, decisions and orders;
• Collect, organise, and collate other assorted metadata fields for legal findings;
• Participate in meetings and substantive discussions on issues arising in the CLD Project;
• Cite-check and edit documents;
• Assist in the development of other language versions of the CLD; and
• Perform other tasks, as requested by the CLD Coordinator.

Required Qualifications

Education:

Candidates must have a degree in law or a relevant legal qualification of a recognised university, demonstrating very good knowledge in international/national criminal law, comparative law and criminology, public international law, international humanitarian law or human rights. Candidates are expected to have a very good record of academic performance.

Experience:

Visiting professional placements focus on candidates who have extensive experience in their professional careers in relevant fields of work. Practical experience that is relevant to the work of the Court is considered an asset. Candidates for a Visiting Professional placement must have at least 3 (three) years of relevant professional experience.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Proven analytical skills;
• Able to adapt to multicultural and multilingual working environments;
• Possesses strong teamwork skills (listens, consults and communicates proactively);
• Very good oral communication and drafting skills;
• Demonstrated attention to detail;
• Has acquired a good standard of computer skills (including Microsoft Office applications) and research skills (including the use of electronic databases).

Knowledge of Languages:

Proficiency in English is required. Knowledge of French and/or Spanish is an asset.