Lubanga Trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC)

Ewing Ahmed
Congolese journalist
Congolese journalist Ewing Ahmed is based in Bukavu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where he reports on transitional justice issues for Search for Common Ground (SFCG), a conflict resolution and conflict prevention NGO. He has reported for Congolese national radio, private radio in Bukavu, and for the United Nations station Radio Okapi. Since October 2008, Ahmed has been the Swahili presenter of the IWPR/SFCG radio program “Facing Justice,” which brings news of the International Criminal Court and Congolese justice issues to listeners throughout the DRC.

Judith Armatta
Judith Armatta is a lawyer, journalist, and human rights advocate who monitored the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on behalf of the Coalition for International Justice. Her dispatches from The Hague appeared in Tribunal Update, published by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting; Monitor, a magazine of political commentary published in Montenegro; the International Herald Tribune; and the Chicago Tribune. Prior to her work in The Hague, Ms. Armatta worked for the American Bar Association’s Central and East European Law Initiative, opening offices in Belgrade, Serbia (in 1997), and Montenegro (in 1999). During the Kosova War, she headed a War Crimes Documentation Project among Kosovar Albanian refugees in Macedonia. Armatta currently consults on international humanitarian, human rights, and other rule of law issues, most recently in the Middle East.

Olivia Bueno
International Refugee Rights Initiative
Olivia Bueno is the International Refugee Rights Initiative’s Associate Director (http://www.refugee-rights.org). She was previously Program Associate at the International Refugee Program at Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). She is responsible for managing IRRI’s New York office, monitoring policies and diplomatic discussions at the United Nations relevant to IRRI’s programmes and coordinating outreach to and collaboration with international NGOs. Olivia also contributes to the oversight and development of IRRI programmes and to institutional development. Olivia has worked on issues of refugee rights and asylum in the United States, as a part time staff member of Human Rights First’s Asylum Program and as Co-Producer of American Purgatory, a radio documentary on the asylum process in the United States. Olivia holds a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Barnard College at Columbia University (2000).

Meribeth Deen
Journalist, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Meribeth Deen worked as a radio producer and reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation between 2005 and 2008. In 2008, she moved to the UK to produce a radio documentary on the British human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. Her documentaries appear on CBC Radio programmes including The Current and Dispatches and on the Radio Netherlands human rights show, The State We’re In.

Jennifer Easterday
Legal Researcher, U.C. Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center, USA
Jennifer Easterday is a senior researcher with the U.C. Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center in California, USA. Jennifer received her JD from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and is a member of the California State Bar. She has published research on the principle of complementarity at the ICC, and on various issues arising in the Special Court for Sierra Leone trial of Charles Taylor.

Wanda Hall
Interactive Radio for Justice
Wanda Hall is the Director and Founder of Interactive Radio for Justice (http://www.irfj.org/) and she has worked, mostly with video, television and radio, to promote civic society and justice through community level projects for over 15 years, starting her overseas work in Russia in the early 1990s. She has consistently found that mass-media is the most effective means to promote an educated and involved citizenship in societies which are experiencing profound transition. She has worked in Russia, Kazakhstan, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic.

Rachel Irwin
Journalist, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Rachel Irwin writes about international justice for The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in The Hague. She has penned in-depth articles about issues relating to cases at the International Criminal Court and covered numerous trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Most recently, she traveled to Bosnia to write a special report on war atrocity denial in the eastern town of Visegrad. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Yvonne McDermott
Yvonne McDermott is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in international criminal law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights.

Wairangala Wakabi
Journalist, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Wairagala Wakabi is a Ugandan journalist covering the trial of Thomas Lubanga for IWPR-The Netherlands. Wakabi has covered the Congo war since 1998, reporting for The Star (South Africa), The EastAfrican (Kenya), The Lancet (UK) and New Internationalist (UK).

Bukeni Tete Waruzi
Program coordinator for Africa and the Middle East, WITNESS
Bukeni Tete Waruzi is the program coordinator for Africa and the Middle East for WITNESS. He is a native of Uvira, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where he worked for over eight years on the issue of child soldiers and children affected by armed conflict. He founded and served as the executive director of Ajedi-Ka/Child Soldiers Project, an organization working to demobilize and reintegrate child soldiers in the DRC. During his organization’s partnership with WITNESS, Bukeni produced several films on child soldiers and the spread of HIV/AIDS in the DRC. He also implemented the use of cell phones as a means of monitoring and reporting child rights violations. Bukeni holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Evangelical University in Africa in Bukavu (DRC) and a master’s degree in human rights and conflict resolution from Chaire Unesco in Bujumbura (Burundi). Bukeni speaks English, French, and Swahili and is conversational in five languages and dialects of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Kelly Dawn Askin
Senior legal officer for the Open Society Justice Initiative
Prior to joining the Open Society Justice Initiative, Ms. Askin served as a legal advisor to the judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda from 2000-2002. For over ten years she has also served as an expert consultant, legal advisor, or international law trainer to prosecutors, judges, and registry at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Serious Crimes Unit in East Timor, the International Criminal Court, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Since 1995, Askin has taught or served as a visiting scholar at Notre Dame Law School, American University’s Washington College of Law, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Yale Law School, and Oxford University. She also served as executive director of the International Criminal Justice Institute and American University’s War Crimes Research Office. In 2005, Ms. Askin was awarded the ASIL’s prestigious Prominent Woman in International Law award. She was also 2004-2005 Fulbright New Century Scholar on the Global Empowerment of Women. Ms. Askin serves on the executive board of the American Branch of the International Law Association, the International Judicial Academy, and International Criminal Law Services. She holds a JD and PhD (law), and is the author of a number of books and law review articles.

Tracey Gurd
Senior advocacy officer for the Open Society Justice Initiative
Tracey Gurd serves as the Open Society Justice Initiative’s senior advocacy officer. Prior to serving in her current position, Tracey worked for six years with the Justice Initiative on issues of international justice, focused specifically on monitoring and advocacy related to the Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodia, the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court. She has worked previously as a legal academic, a journalist, and an international policy adviser for the Australian government in both Australia and Central Europe. Tracey has co-edited an academic collection on women and armed conflict, Listening to the Silences: Women and War and is co-editing a forthcoming collection on efforts to make international justice meaningful to war afflicted communities.

Alpha Sesay
Legal officer of the Open Society Justice Initiative
Alpha serves as the legal officer for international justice based in The Hague. Prior to joining Justice Initiative full time, Mr. Sesay held several positions including Trial Monitor on Justice Initiative’s Charles Taylor Trial Monitoring project; as National Director of the Sierra Leone Court Monitoring program; as legal assistant/officer of the Morris Kallon Defense Team at the Special Court for Sierra Leone; as human rights lecturer at the University of Sierra Leone and as consultant for Human Rights Watch. He holds an LL.M. in international human rights law from the University of Notre Dame, USA and an LL.B Honors from the University of Sierra Leone.