Word: ocampo
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Since arriving in the Hague in 2003, Moreno-Ocampo, 55, has become the public face and voice of the ICC, the first permanent global court devoted to prosecuting crimes against humanity. Though largely obscure outside legal and human-rights circles--and hampered by the fact that the U.S. and a number of other countries are not state parties to the court--the ICC has raised its profile in recent months, opening its first two trials against warlords from Congo. It will gain wider public attention with the Nov.2 U.S. release of Darfur Now, a Syriana-style documentary that chronicles Moreno...
...Moreno-Ocampo speaks in clipped, declarative sentences and sports the three-day stubble of a man who constantly looks as if he just got off a long-haul flight. When I met him for breakfast at the ICC's cafeteria in late October, he ordered two coffees at a time, to avoid having to go back for refills. Though he has indicted nine people from three different conflicts, Moreno-Ocampo knows he needs to deliver results in the form of high-profile convictions to ensure that the court evolves into something more than a monument to good intentions. "The next...
...Moreno-Ocampo gained fame in Argentina in the '80s for prosecuting human-rights abuses committed by the country's ruling military junta. In 2003 he signed on for a nine-year term as prosecutor at the ICC. Unlike earlier tribunals--such as U.N.-sponsored courts for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone--the ICC is able to prosecute atrocities in conflicts that are still raging...
That mandate led Moreno-Ocampo to Darfur. After the Security Council voted in 2005 to authorize the ICC to investigate war crimes committed there, Moreno-Ocampo launched a probe that involved deposing hundreds of witnesses in 17 countries. By the end of 2006, the prosecutor's team produced evidence of Harun's role in planning and executing the killing campaign against Darfur's civilians. In a bracing scene in Darfur Now, a female rebel soldier, whose son was killed by the janjaweed, tells her comrades of "a man named Ocampo" who will deliver punishment to their enemies...
...Moreno-Ocampo believes in the inevitability of international justice, the idea that even the world's worst thugs will face a reckoning in court. "To me, he really seems like a Don Quixote figure," says Ted Braun, director of Darfur Now. "He's one man, working alone, taking on the world with a great vision of what he can do, but without a lot of overt backing." If that bothers Moreno-Ocampo, he doesn't show it. Finishing his coffee, he tells me that the ICC is helping to establish a new approach to international relations, in which states interact...