Two students, professor travel to New York United Nations over break for Assembly of States Parties

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While many students spent their winter breaks with family, working and relaxing from a hectic semester, two students spent five days at the United Nations in New York City.

Royal Oak senior Jeff Lambert and Mount Pleasant junior Erica Maylee traveled with Hope May, associate professor of philosophy and religion, to attend the 10th Session of the Assembly of States Parties with funding from the Student Budget Allocation Committee and the Department of Philosophy and Religion.

Held each year, the ASP is an event for non-governmental organizations participating as observers. A large delegation of civil society representatives from all over the world attended the 10th session of the ASP, according to the website of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court.

Lambert and Maylee are president and vice president of the International Criminal Court Student Network (ICCSN), which functions as an NGO to the Court, supporting its work.

The ICC, located in The Hague, Netherlands, is a tribunal started in 2002 to try individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. They only have jurisdiction in member states. The United States is not currently a member.

Lambert, Maylee and May attended not only large, formal procedures, but also small roundtable discussions with organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice.

May said she was was inspired by the presentation by Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice (WIGJ), a group working with the ICC to ensure the jurisprudence of the ICC is sensitive to gender issues.

The WIGJ works to encourage the ICC to be mindful of the relationship between gender and justice, May said.

Lambert, Maylee and May also met with Skylight Pictures, a production company that films documentaries about the ICC and human rights abuses worldwide.

The filmmakers invited the three to a screening of their newest documentary, “Granito.” It tells the story of director Pamela Yates, a filmmaker whose documentary film was used in a trial against the Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt 20 years after she filmed it. Granito premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011 and won the Jury Grand Prize for Politics on Film, according to the Skylight Pictures website.

“Granito is a Maya concept that says that each of us have a tiny grain of sand to contribute to positive social change,” Yates said in an email.

“No one is more heroic than another … social change only occurs when we each contribute our tiny grains of sand collectively, forcefully,” she said.

Maylee related this concept to the prosecutor-elect of the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, whose election Lambert, Maylee and May attended. Bensouda started as an intern at a court in Gambia, her home country. At the time, the ICC did not exist, but she was still working toward international justice.

“They were working on international law before our generation was even born, but they didn’t know there was going to be a court,” Maylee said.

Lambert and Maylee said they were inspired to join the ICCSN after taking a summer course with May in The Hague.