2005 Women PeaceMakers Conference -
"Global Women's Court of Accountability"

Distinguished Panel of Judges

Fatou Bensouda was elected deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague in 2004. She is in charge of the Prosecution Division of the Office of the Prosecutor. Bensouda previously worked as a legal advisor and trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, rising to the position of senior legal advisor and head of the legal advisory unit. She has served as attorney general and minister of justice in The Gambia, in which capacity she served as chief legal advisor to the president and cabinet of The Gambia. During her government service, Bensouda represented The Gambia at several international forums, including the negotiations on the treaty of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the West African Parliament and the ECOWAS Tribunal.

 

Joy Ngozi Ezeilo is a senior lecturer at the Department for Public and Private Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Nigeria. She is a former state commissioner for Women’s Affairs and Social Development and a federal delegate to the National Political Reforms Conference in Nigeria. Ezeilo is a founder of the Women’s Aid Collective, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that promotes the human rights of women and young people through a wide range of services including free legal aid. She is the chairperson of a committee established by the minister of justice and attorney general of the federation to draft legislation on the elimination of violence against women. She has been Regent Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and British Chevening Scholar and has received awards from the Funds for Leadership Development through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Richard Goldstone, former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, was eminent leader in residence at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice in 2005. From 1992 to 1993, he chaired the Commission of Inquiry into political violence in South Africa, later known as the Goldstone Commission, during South Africa’s transition in the post-apartheid era. The United Nations Security Council named him chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and he then chaired the Independent International Commission on Kosovo from 1999 to 2001. In 2004 he was appointed by then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as a member of the independent high-level panel charged with investigating the Oil-for-Food Program in Iraq. He has written widely on international human rights and international criminal law and authored For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator in 2000. Goldstone is a member of the IPJ’s International Council.

Carmen Kcomt is a family and juvenile court judge from Peru and has worked in the Domestic Violence Clinic in El Cajon, Calif., as a volunteer through the San Diego Volunteer Lawyers Program. She was a professor at the National University of Piura and the University of Piura and supervised human rights interns for the United Nations Development Programme in rural villages in Piura, Peru. Kcomt has published more than 70 articles on human rights and contributed to two publications, Llevanto el Velo and the Manual Sobre los Derechos de los Niños, as well as a child rights manual used throughout Latin America by the NGO Save the Children. She studied law and political science at San Martin de Porres University in Lima, Peru, and earned a postgraduate degree in International Human Rights Law from Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile. Forced to leave Peru because of her work for human rights, Kcomt works as a freelance writer in San Diego.

Marguerite Waller is professor of Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. She has published widely in the areas of feminist theory, contemporary women’s movements and feminist border art and performance. Waller’s recent publications include the co-edited works Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance, which details the work and thought of new feminisms evolving in militarized situations around the world, and Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, in which a diverse group of transnational feminist activists and scholars enact a transnational feminist solidarity that sees difference as a practical and intellectual resource rather than as an obstacle to coalition.