Pictured here: ICC Judge Bertram Schmitt with the winning team from Lomonosov Moscow State University © ICC-CPI/Aleksandra Milic
Lomonosov Moscow State University won the final round of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Moot Court Competition, Russian version, held in Courtroom II of the new ICC premises in The Hague (the Netherlands).
Siberian Federal University won second place and Kazan Federal University came in third. The Best Speaker award went to Ruslan Sharipov of Kazan Federal University. Members of the winning team are Marila Andreeva, Sergei Kondratev, Georgii Kurganskii, Karina Kotenko and Alina Tsykunova.
On the judge’s bench for this competition were ICC Judge Bertram Schmitt, presiding, Special Assistant to the ICC President Philipp Ambach and Legal Officer Rebecca Young.
This version of the ICC Moot Court Competition is organised by the Law Faculty of National Research University Higher School of Economics with institutional support from the ICC. This year, 13 teams and 70 students representing two countries (Russia (12) and Belarus (1)) took part in the preliminary stage of the competition, which was completed in early May. Three of the teams were from Moscow, five teams were new to the competition this year, and the geographical scope of competing teams spanned across several thousand kilometers from west (Kaliningrad) to east (Krasnoyarsk in Siberia).
In the wider competition, the judges represented 11 countries (Russia, UK, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland and Kazakhstan) and included university professors, legal practitioners, former competitors who now work in the sphere of either international or criminal law. Former ICC Judge Anita Usačka also took part in the competition as a judge.
The organisational and financial support for the competition was provided by Kuznetsova’s Center for International Criminal Law and Comparative Criminal Law Studies (Faculty of Law, Lomonosov Moscow State University), the Russian National Group of International Association of Penal Law, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Russian Federation, the International Committee of the Red Cross (Regional Delegation in Moscow), the legal firms ‘FBK Legal’ and ‘Zabeyda, Kasatkin, Saushkin and partners’. The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Russian Federation also supported the competition and the winning teams in their trip to The Hague. The Ambassador of the Kingdom of Netherlands, H.E. Ron J.P.M. van Dartel visited the semi-final rounds. At the closing ceremony he addressed the participants and delivered the prizes to the winners.
In the context of its Academic Programme, the ICC supports the organisation of ICC Moot Court Competitions in Chinese, English, Russian and Spanish, with a view to also support Arabic and French versions in the future. These initiatives play a critical role in galvanising interest in the Court’s work with academic communities as well as in enhancing promotion and respect for international criminal law.
