Thanksgiving is around the corner…That means it is THIMUN Singapore season! Unlike my past experiences, I decided to step out of my comfort zone this year—-attending a MUN conference as an advocate in an international court, which essentially makes me a lawyer.

THIMUN Singapore, per usual, was hosted at Hwa Chong Institution this year, from November 19th to 22nd, 2019. This year, the international court involved in the conference is the International Criminal Court (hereafter ICC or Court) instead of the usual International Court of Justice (ICJ). As Julia, an IB Year 2 student at our school, and I were assigned to be the prosecution advocates, we were essentially acting as the prosecutors charging our suspect Mr. Ahmand Al Faqi Al Mahdi of war crimes for bombing cultural heritage sites in Timbuktu, Mali.

This experience involved a huge amount of creativity in a rather unconventional way. People may argue that we were essentially building up the case based on the given information from the actual Court in real life already. However, things were not that easy for us. Different from the actual case, we prosecutors could not use any words said by the accused Mr. Al Mahdi. This constituted a huge challenge for us since the actual court proceedings involved Mr. Al Mahdi pleading guilty during the opening of the court, making the case closed way faster than usual. Without that, we prosecutors needed to meet our burden of proof to prove the accused suspect Mr. Al Mahdi guilty. However, without enough evidence, we failed our mission.

Besides all the fancy legal terms I had acquainted with and some public speaking skills I had improved last week, I would say this progress is creative since we needed to produce documents including the memorandum (basically a lawsuit), evidence packet, and witness list. For the actual court proceedings, we needed to prepare an opening statement, witness questioning, cross-fire questions, and a closing statement. The CAS cycle had been spontaneously recurring throughout the entire process. The research and preparation process involved Julia and I gathering sources and evidence online to build up our case (which was challenging at times since we were forbidden to use official ICC documents), while the action part was essentially the actual conference where we presented the case to the Court. Julia and I both agree that reflection took place now and then when we inspected ourselves to discuss our performance and our areas of improvement–that was an essential part of team-bonding and some of my favorite moments throughout the process.

This CAS experience might be spontaneous, but it was one of my favorite ones so far. What I learned throughout this process is more than “how to be a lawyer” and knowledge of international law. The creativity component also existed in a more abstract form where we needed to come up with arguments and evidence that the actual court probably did not need to (due to Mr. Al Mahdi’s statement of “I plead guilty”). The ICC experience itself actually took up to 4 months of preparation–starting from mid-July. Looking back, all of our hard work concluded within a week and marked a bittersweet end of my ICC/ICJ journey. But you never know–perhaps this journey is not going to end here.

Next month, I will be striving to get more involved in my activity and service components. Stay tuned! For now, enjoy some ICC photos!