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Remarks by Michael Scharf

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2023

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Extract

Thank you so much, Catherine. As Catherine said, I am Michael Scharf, dean of Case Western Reserve University School of Law. We are very pleased to be sponsoring this program today, a conversation with Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji, one of my oldest friends in this field and recipient of the Butcher Medal.

Type
Goler T. Butcher Medal Lecture: The Accountability of Sovereign Power for International Crimes
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The American Society of International Law

Thank you so much, Catherine. As Catherine said, I am Michael Scharf, dean of Case Western Reserve University School of Law. We are very pleased to be sponsoring this program today, a conversation with Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji, one of my oldest friends in this field and recipient of the Butcher Medal.

Judge Eboe-Osuji served as president of the International Criminal Court in The Hague from 2018 to 2021. He was a trial chamber judge of the ICC from 2012 to 2018 and an appeals chamber judge from 2018 until his retirement in 2021. During that time, he presided over one of the most important decisions of the appeals chamber, and that is the question of immunity of heads of state in the al-Bashir case, decided in 2019. You will hear him talk to you a bit about that decision. We are going to explore some of its ramifications to the Ukraine crisis, which is unfolding today.

Prior to joining the ICC, Judge Eboe-Osuji served as the legal advisor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. He was also appeals counsel for the prosecution in the Charles Taylor case in the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Earlier he served as senior prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and he practiced law as a litigator before trial courts in both Canada and Nigeria. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, an LLM degree from McGill University in Canada, and received his Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Calabar in Nigeria.

Since completing his term at the ICC, Judge Eboe-Osuji now holds appointments as distinguished international jurist at Ryerson University in Canada, Paul Martin Senior Professor of Political Science at the University of Windsor, and as Senior Fellow at the Carr Center at Harvard University.

We are going to start with some remarks from Judge Eboe-Osuji, followed by a conversation with me, and then Q&A from the audience. Please, everybody, join me in both welcoming Judge Eboe-Osuji and congratulating him for the honor of the Butcher Medal.