Diplomacy & Public Service
Peerless
Fatou Bensouda
born 1961
The first woman and first African Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
Peerless is level 1 of 4 in the The Gambia Hall of Fame: changed the field itself. Tell the country's story without them and the story breaks. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
For nine years she decided who the world's permanent war crimes court would prosecute — the first woman and the first African to hold the office.
Fatou Bom Bensouda trained as a lawyer in Banjul and Lagos and rose to become The Gambia's solicitor general and then attorney general and minister of justice under Yahya Jammeh, a post she left in 2000. She went to Arusha as a legal adviser and trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and in 2004 became Deputy Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
In 2012 the states parties elected her Prosecutor by consensus, and she served the full nine-year term. She secured the court's first convictions to stand on appeal, including that of Bosco Ntaganda, and opened examinations and investigations far outside the African cases the court had been criticised for confining itself to — Georgia, Burundi, Bangladesh and Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Palestine.
The Afghanistan and Palestine decisions cost her. In September 2020 the United States government imposed economic sanctions on her personally and barred her from the country, an action condemned across the court's membership and reversed the following year. She left office in 2021 and became The Gambia's high commissioner to the United Kingdom.
In 2012 the states parties elected her Prosecutor by consensus, and she served the full nine-year term. She secured the court's first convictions to stand on appeal, including that of Bosco Ntaganda, and opened examinations and investigations far outside the African cases the court had been criticised for confining itself to — Georgia, Burundi, Bangladesh and Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Palestine.
The Afghanistan and Palestine decisions cost her. In September 2020 the United States government imposed economic sanctions on her personally and barred her from the country, an action condemned across the court's membership and reversed the following year. She left office in 2021 and became The Gambia's high commissioner to the United Kingdom.
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