Song Sang-hyun

President, International Criminal Court

Date of Birth: 21/12/1941

As eyes turn to Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo's handling of cases against Sudanese President Omer Hassan Ahmed el Beshir, Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba and the authors of Kenya's 2007 post-election violence, a South Korean judge runs things behind the scenes at the International Criminal Court. ICC President Song Sang-hyun is in charge of administration and chooses which judges sit on which panels. Acknowledging that his organisation faces cases of tremendous political significance, Song pledged to the United Nations General Assembly in late October that the ICC's judges would act with conscientious impartiality.

Song Sang-hyun was admitted to the bar in 1964 after earning a law degree from Seoul National University Law School the previous year. He has been a member of the advisory committees to South Korea's Supreme Court and Justice Ministry for three decades, working on legal reforms. He joined the ICC's first bench of judges in 2003, assigned to the Appeals Division. In 2006, he was re-elected and in March 2009 won the Presidency. His first African tour in this capacity was in June; he visited Tanzania, Lesotho and Botswana to urge their governments to adopt the Rome Statute, the ICC's founding treaty, into their domestic legislation.

Thirty of the ICC's 110 signatories are African. Uganda, Congo-Kinshasa and Central African Republic have each referred cases to the court. The trial of Congolese warlords Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui began 24 November in The Hague. In the Uganda case, warrants have been issued for Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and three of his deputies.