High Court judge Anthony Thomas Aquinas Carmona has been elected a judge of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Hague.The elections took place at the United Nations in New York on Monday.Carmona, 58, who was nominated for the position by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago, was also the Caricom representative in the elections which saw judges from 18 countries worldwide, competing for one of six places on the ICC.Carmona won the office in the first ballot in the Assembly of States Parties, consisting of 119 countries, with 72 votes.He placed second to Miriam Defensor Santiago, the first Filipino and Asian from a developing country to serve as ICC judge. She garnered 79 votes. Only 70 votes were needed.
He and five other judges will take up office on March 11, 2012.The appointment, which is for nine years, means that Carmona, who has been on the Bench since 2004, will have to give up his position as a judge and migrate to the Hague.Among his more notable cases are the first successful prosecution in the British Commonwealth of senior magistrate Patrick Jagessar for corruption and the first successful prosecution at Court of Appeal in the West Indies of Farouk Ali, a Justice of the Peace, for corruption.Carmona is at present presiding in the San Fernando Supreme Court over the trial in which Marlon King is accused of killing his stepdaughter Amy Annamunthodo.Over the next few months, he will have to complete all of the cases before him.Carmona is the second Trinidadian to have been elected to the ICC, the independent body that prosecutes individuals for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The first was former attorney general Karl Hudson-Phillips who was elected in 2003 to serve for nine years, but resigned the position in 2007 for personal reasons. He is also the second member of the local judiciary to have been elected to an international law body. The first was Justice Anthony Lucky who was recently reelected to the International Tribunal Law of the Sea (ITLOS).Lucky's daughter, former judge Gillian Lucky, congratulated Carmona on his appointment.She said having worked with him as a temporary judge and having appeared before him as a practitioner, "I can attest to his integrity, competence and commitment to the positive development of our country."About Anthony CarmonaAnthony Carmona was born on March 7, 1953. He attended Presentation College, San Fernando.He attended the University of the West Indies and the Sir Hugh Wooding Law School between 1973 and 1983. In 1989, he became a senior state Attorney.
From 1994 to 1999, he was first Assistant then Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions. From 2001 to 2004, he was an Appeals Counsel at the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague as well as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha.
In 2004, he was appointed a High Court judge at the Supreme Court of Trinidad and Tobago