Talk:Judges of the International Criminal Court

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Judges of the International Criminal Court article.
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Judges of the International Criminal Court was a good article nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Reviewed version: February 11, 2008
Maintained The following user(s) are actively involved with this article and may be able to help with questions about verification and sources:
User:AndrewRT
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[edit] Failed GA

This article still needs some more work, mostly in beefin up the content. The content that is present is well written The main problems with this article mainly revolve around its very sanitised nature and the heavy focus on the official line of the ICC and the UN, which is its parent organisation

  • Firstly, the entire article lacks any independent sources whatsoever. All the sources are either the ICC itself, the UN which is the parent of the ICC, and a group which calls itself the "Coalition for the International Criminal Court" which is therefore a lobby group which has a favourable opinion of the ICC. As these are the sources used, it is only going to give positive spin, PR patter for the ICC and the "idealised" and theroretical way in which the ICC works, not necessarily how it actually works. At the moment, it resembles an ICC press release
  • The article is in large part comprised of excerpts from constitutional documents of the ICC< which biases the article towards how the court allegedly operates, at least in theory, and there is little discussion of how it actually works, citing law professors and such. At the moment it simply cites theoretical things like "A judge may be disqualified from "any case in which his or her impartiality might reasonably be doubted on any ground", and a judge may be removed from office if he or she "is found to have committed serious misconduct or a serious breach of his or her duties" or is unable to exercise his or her functions." Espeically with the 100% emphasis on the official line in the lead, there is only things about how everything is supposed to work in perfect justice. There is no discussion about how countries can vote for judges on political or geopolitical or ideological reasons
  • There should be information about how the Assembly of States Parties votes of the nominees, and how the nominees are brought forward by their countries. Do the countries nominate judges who they know will tow the line on their partisan ideologies on their foreign policies. Do countries nominate as their own candidates people who have are not legally qualified but because of their political stances? Do countries do deals with other countries to stitch up factional trades like in other UN bodies.
  • Information on controversial elections, judges of dubious merit winning due to political deals, etc are not covered.
  • Discussion among the legal community as to whether the correct judges are voted in, the efficiency of the court is not present
  • No information on the actual performance of the judges is offered and what cases they did.
  • Information should be given on why one of the judges lost support and was voted off
  • The judges that resigned, their official reasons were stated by the ICC. Were there unofficial reasons, such as being pushed wich were covered up with a smokescreen??
  • Have there been politically motivated instances where judges were dragged? or framed?
  • Were there any attempts of these powerplays?
  • The psephology of the court should be discussed - the various factions/cabal in the court and how the president and the VPs were elected by their peers.
  • Some discussion on the individual judges and their background would be good.
  • There are too many short 1-2 line paragraphs that should be expanded or merged into other paragraphs.

Best regards, Blnguyen (bananabucket) 03:42, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Blnguyen,
Thanks for taking the time to review the article. As the article's main author, I'm obviously pretty biased but I genuinely think most of these criticisms are way off the mark. The reason the article doesn't discuss any controversies or alternative viewpoints is because, to the best of my knowledge, there are none to discuss. I take your point that the article is highly dependent on official sources and I'll dig out some independent references, but the content of the article is completely uncontroversial, and you won't find any significant disagreement about any of this stuff in the literature. What you call the "official line" is just the standard, mainstream view, which everyone accepts. Your suggestions about power plays, cover-ups, cabals, smokescreens, controversial elections, judges of dubious merit being elected due to political deals, framing of judges, judges not giving the true reasons for their resignations, etc. are all pretty far out. None of the media coverage or academic literature has ever hinted at anything like this, and I don't think the article should be faulted for not discussing imaginary controversies.
To address some of your specific points:
  • "There are too many short 1-2 line paragraphs that should be expanded or merged into other paragraphs" - Fair enough, I'll merge wherever possible.
  • "it resembles an ICC press release" - It would be helpful if you could point to a specific section or sentence that doesn't have a neutral point of view, or a notable controversy or criticism that the article doesn't cover.
  • "Some discussion on the individual judges and their background would be good" - I don't think any other article about a judicial office contains discussion of individual judges. (See, for example, Chief Justice of the United States, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Chief Justice of Canada.) Maybe you could point to an article that contains the kind of information you're looking for, so I can understand where you're coming from. As present, the tables in this article contain basic information about each of the judges, and their individual biographies will hopefully contain more. It would be quite unwieldy to include even a short background paragraph about each of the 22 ICC judges to date, and I don't see what purpose it would serve.
  • "Information should be given on why one of the judges lost support and was voted off" - Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any reliable, published sources that discuss this stuff — the international media aren't very interested in these elections, and law journals don't generally discuss individual elections — so it doesn't belong in the article. In any case, I wouldn't read too much into Slade's defeat in 2006, and I don't think it's accurate to say he lost support: the reality is that all six outgoing judges were seeking re-election, and one outstanding new candidate emerged (Ekaterina Trendafilova, who topped the poll) so one sitting judge had to lose his job. Of the six outgoing judges, Slade was the one who had received the least support in 2003 (he scraped through on the 28th round of polling) so it came as no surprise that he didn't make the cut in 2006. If anyone can find a good discussion of this stuff, please add it. I don't think it's a major omission though.
  • "No information on the actual performance of the judges is offered and what cases they did" - Since the first trial hasn't started yet, there's not much literature about the "actual performance of the judges". If there were any significant criticisms of the judges' performance, it would be important to include it. But there's not. This discussion will probably have to wait a couple more years. (In any case, I don't think this article is the right place for a critique of the ICC's decisions and case law. I don't think readers looking for information about "the efficiency of the court", particular cases, etc. will come to an article called "Judges of the International Criminal Court".)
  • I appreciate what you're saying about how the article focuses on theory rather than practice. However, the Court is only six years old, and there isn't much literature on the practice. To take up your specific example of how judges can be disqualified: as far as I'm aware, there has never been any serious suggestion of disqualifying or removing a particular judge so there's no literature on "how it actually works" as opposed to how it's supposed to work.
Finally, I think your claim that the article is "sanitised" and gives a "positive spin" is completely untrue. I don't think it's fair to criticise an article because it fails to discuss controversies where no controversies exist.
Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to offer suggestions. I'll try to implement them as best I can. Sideshow Bob Roberts (talk) 13:59, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
You'll be glad to know I have a self-imposed policy of not reviewing the same GAC twice. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 01:22, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
I hope my comments didn't read like a personal attack. Rest assured that if I ever nominate this or any other article again, I'll be happy for you to review it. I can imagine these reviews are a fairly thankless task and there are bound to be disagreements. I might disagree with your opinion but I appreciate your taking the time to review the article. Regards, Sideshow Bob Roberts (talk) 16:00, 20 February 2008 (UTC)