On 6 February 2023, high-level experts including several Presidents of international criminal courts and tribunals came together in Nuremberg for an expert seminar on judicial ethics. The Nuremberg Academy hosted the first seminar of the project “Ethica, on the path to a common code of ethics for international criminal judges”. This project, led by the Nuremberg Academy, the Ecole nationale de la magistrature and the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, explores the path towards a common deontology for international criminal jurisdictions, following the “Paris Declaration on the Effectiveness of International Criminal Justice” elaborated in 2017.
The project aims to identify the ethical rules applicable to international criminal judges on the basis of concrete cases that have arisen, or are likely to arise, before international criminal jurisdictions. This first seminar opened the expert discussion on the practices of international criminal judges in terms of ethics and professional conduct. The participants exchanged on a multitude of subjects relating to four major themes of the ethics of judges: independence; impartiality; privacy, dignity and probity; and career and professional conscience.
Dr Viviane Dittrich, currently Acting Director of the Nuremberg Academy, officially opened the seminar welcoming the international experts in Nuremberg and actively participated in the full one-day event. The seminar was conducted bilingually, with French-English and English-French simultaneous interpretation.
The work is directed by a scientific committee composed of Judge Nicolas Guillou, Judge José Igreja Matos, Professor William Schabas and Professor Mónica Pinto. The second seminar will pursue the work on judicial ethics with the same experts, to be held at the Ecole nationale de la magistrature in Paris on 15 May.
France supports this project through a financial contribution from the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs and Expertise France.