Photo credit: United Nations Archives. A group of visitors from Japan look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights during a visit to the UN’s temporary headquarters at Lake Success in February 1950.

Today – December 10, the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the 2018 ICC Assembly of States Parties resumed after a one day break. The main focus of the day was on the ICC’s budget. The ICC’s Registrar, Peter Lewis, and the Chair of the Committee on Budget and Finance (CBF), Hitoshi Kozaki (Japan), both presented. The Assembly then considered the audit reports.

The organs of the ICC have jointly presented a budget request for just over 151 million Euros, while the CBF recommended a budget of 144.87 million Euros. A number of NGOs, including the Coalition for an ICC, have urged states to consider the CBF recommendations as the bare minimum  budget for the 2019 budget discussions, as opposed to the starting point from which to cut.

An important side-event took place today titled “Call it what it is: Campaign to define sexual violence”. It was organized by the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice (WIGJ) and co-hosted by Argentina, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and WIGJ. Melisa Handl is contributing two blog posts today to this IntLawGrrls symposium on this topic. Melissa is attending the ICC Assembly of States Parties with the Canadian Partnership for International Justice (CPIJ).

Melisa is a lawyer from Argentina and a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa (Canada). Her research interests include international law, gender, development, qualitative research, and international human rights. Melisa holds a Master of Arts in International Affairs with specialization in “International Institutions and Global Governance” from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (Canada). Melisa also holds a Master of Laws from the University of Ottawa with a specialization in Human Rights and Social Justice. She is currently investigating whether conditional cash transfers are contributing to greater gender equality in the context of Argentina, and intends to connect a top-down approach to international human rights with the experiences of actual beneficiary women on the ground. She is part of a Canada-Mexico project which involves training Mexican judges on issues related to international human rights and is in charge of the “Violence Against Women and Gender” workshop. She is working with Professor and CPIJ Co-Researcher Penelope Simons on corporate accountability, gender, and the extractive industry and specifically, writing about gendering the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights from a socio-legal feminist methodology.

A heartfelt welcome to Melisa to this IntLawGrrls symposium!