Fatou Bensouda

Fatou Bom Bensouda (Nyang; born 31 January 1961) is a Gambian lawyer and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who has served as the Gambian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom since 3 August 2022.

Born on 31 January 1961 in Banjul (then Bathurst), Gambia, into a polygamous Muslim family, she is the daughter of Omar Gaye Nyang, who was a government driver and the country's most prominent wrestling promoter.

Her father was a major landowner who also owned several wrestling arenas in the country.

Fatou Bensouda is the niece of the Gambian historian and author Alieu Ebrima Cham Joof.

Her father is related to the Joof family through his maternal grandmother Ndombuur Joof (Alieu Ebrima Cham Joof's great-aunt).

Ndombuur is also the paternal grandmother of the renowned singer Marie Samuel Njie.

She attended primary and secondary school in the Gambia before leaving in 1982 for Nigeria, where she graduated from the University of Ife with a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) degree in 1986.

The following year, she obtained her professional qualification as a barrister-at-law from the Nigeria Law School.

She later became the Gambia's first expert in international maritime law after earning a master's of laws from the International Maritime Law Institute in Malta.

Fatou Bensouda was appointed as state counsel in 1987 and deputy director of public prosecutions in February 1994 for Sir Dawda Jawara's government.

He is notably accused of harassing the opposition and the press, after the coup in 1994.

She played a central role in the early years of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh's regime, being chosen as his Solicitor General and legal adviser in 1996, after he took power in the 1994 Gambian coup d'état.

Before that she was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of The Gambia from 1998 to 2000.

She has also held positions as a legal adviser and a trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

She became Minister of Justice and Attorney General in August 1998, but was dismissed from both posts in March 2000.

She has been criticised in The Gambia for her role in the dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh.

and has denied the responsibility for her prosecutions and the cases of torture under the regime she was a part of.

Yahya Jammeh's former regime was accused by human rights groups of various abuses.

Bensouda's international career as a non-government civil servant began at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she worked as a legal adviser and a trial attorney before rising to the position of senior legal adviser and head of the Legal Advisory Unit (May 2002 to August 2004).

On 8 August 2004, she was elected as Deputy Prosecutor (Prosecutions) with an overwhelming majority of votes by the Assembly of State Parties of the International Criminal Court.

On 1 November 2004, she was sworn into Office as Deputy Prosecutor (Prosecutions).

On 1 December 2011, the Assembly of States Parties of the ICC announced that an informal agreement had been reached to make Bensouda the consensus choice to succeed Luis Moreno-Ocampo as Prosecutor of the ICC.

She was formally elected by consensus on 12 December 2011.

She served as Prosecutor from June 2012 to June 2021, after having served as a Deputy Prosecutor in charge of the Prosecutions Division of the ICC from 2004 to 2012.

Her term as prosecutor began on 15 June 2012.

The alleged crimes were connected with violent government suppression of pro-European protests from 2013 to 2014, and claims of crimes in Crimea around and following the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, and in eastern Ukraine, where Russia had supported rebels since 2014.

However, the prosecutors did not get permission for a full-scale investigation until after Bensouda left the court.

Less than a month before handing over her post to her successor, Karim Khan, she declared in a podcast: "Something I have experienced is pressure, attacks and politicization [but] what we do in this office is critically important," adding, "History will judge us."

On June 15, 2021, after a nine-year mandate as Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Bensouda stepped down, passing her role to Karim Khan.

Bensouda is a member of the International Gender Champions (IGC).

She was previously a member of International Advisory Council, International Board of Maritime Healthcare. She is a member of both The Gambia Bar Association and the Nigeria Bar Association.

According to an Associated Press report on 6 November 2015, Bensouda was advised that war crimes may have been committed on the ship Mavi Marmara in 2010, when eight Turks and one Turkish-American were killed and several other activists were wounded by Israeli commandos, but she ruled that the case was not serious enough to merit an investigation on behalf of the ICC.

In November 2017, Bensouda advised the ICC to consider seeking charges for human rights abuses committed during the War in Afghanistan such as alleged rapes and torture by the United States Armed Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency, crime against humanity committed by the Taliban, and war crimes committed by the Afghan National Security Forces.

John Bolton, National Security Advisor of the United States, claimed that the International Criminal Court had no jurisdiction over the United States, which has not ratified the Rome Statute that created the ICC.

However, Afghanistan did ratify the Rome Statute, and thus crimes committed on its territory by anyone, even if he or she is a citizen of a country that did not accept the ICC's legitimacy, is subject to its jurisdiction.

In April 2018 -- following the 2017-2018 Rohingya Crisis in which hundreds of thousands of mostly-Muslim Rohingya people in western Myanmar's Rakhine State were attacked or driven from their homes by government and civilian attackers, in alleged ethnic cleansing and genocide -- Bensouda sought a ruling from the ICC that it had jurisdiction over the crisis, despite Myanmar having never ratified the Rome Statute.

Because many of the Rohingya were driven into neighboring Bangladesh, a signatory to the statute, the court concurred with her, and a full-scale investigation was initiated.

On 2September 2020, Bensouda was named a "specially designated national" by the United States government under the Trump administration, forbidding all U.S. persons and companies from doing business with her.

The Biden administration reversed course on 2April 2021 when President Joe Biden revoked EO 13928, removing Bensouda from the SDN list; US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement calling the previous sanctions "inappropriate and ineffective", but still restated that Washington will continue strongly opposing any ICC's actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations.

In December 2020, regarding Ukraine and Russia, Bensouda alleged that a preliminary ICC probe found indications of "a broad range of conduct" in 2013-2014 that constituted "war crimes and crimes against humanity", and said they were "within the jurisdiction of the [ICC]."