Virtual Internship Opportunity at International Criminal Court

Important message

To participate in containing the COVID-19 spread and in line with the measures adopted by the Host State, interns and visiting professionals may be asked to work remotely during their placement. While working remotely, they are still required to work from within the duty station, The Hague. The currently applicable measures of the Court will be shared with each candidate prior to the starting date of his/her placement.

Contract Duration

Interns are required to work full time for a period between (minimum) three and six months (to be agreed to prior to commencement). Intern placements shall normally not be extended beyond six months. The starting date of the placement may vary, upon agreement.

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 interns to support the Chambers Working Group (CWG) in relation to the Case Law Database (CLD) Project. The CLD Project is aimed at creating a database of the Court’s jurisprudence. To that end, the Chambers Working Group extracts legal findings from the Court’s decisions and identifies relevant keywords and other metadata (‘head-noting’). The selected candidates will work within the CWG and contribute to the head-noting process under the supervision of the CWG Coordinator.

Duties and Responsibilities

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

• Conduct in-depth legal analysis of the Court’s judgments, decisions and orders and identify and extract key legal findings and identify 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 CWG 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:

Internship placements focus on candidates in the early stages of their professional careers. Practical experience is not an essential prerequisite for selection. Should there be a practical experience that is relevant to the work of the Court, it may be considered an asset. However, such working experience should not exceed 3 (three) years.

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;
• 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.

Other criteria:

It is the Court’s objective to have diversity and gender balance. And in line with the ICC’s efforts to improve geographical representation among staff, nationals of non-represented and under-represented countries at the ICC are encouraged to apply. The list can be found here.

Remuneration

Please note that internship and visiting professional placements at the ICC are unfunded. The ICC is not able to provide participants in the Internship and Visiting Professional Programme with any remuneration, nor is it possible to provide reimbursement for expenses incurred prior, during or after the internship or visiting professional placement.

Applicants must therefore be able to support themselves for the entire duration of their internship or visiting professional placement.

Limited funding may, however, be available through the ICC’s Trust Fund for the Development of Interns and Visiting Professionals, which receives donations from States Parties and other donors.

If funding is available, the Human Resources Section will advertise a funded vacancy announcement in accordance with the terms of reference of the Trust Fund as agreed by the donors.

In order to be eligible for a funded placement, if advertised, the applicant must, among other criteria, be a national from a country that is a State Party to the Rome Statue and appears on the United Nations Statistics Division’s list of developing regions.