Disclosure of information

The first week at GPF is behind me and it has been a week of many activities both inside and outside the office. I must admit that I felt quite nervous at the start of my first day. That feeling of having to start all over again and those many questions that run through your head constantly. Why am I doing this? Why is this fun? What kind of work will I be doing? Will I like my colleagues? Will I get there in time? Which tie should I wear? In the end ofcourse it all turned out fine. As I walked out of Grand Central that monday morning into that thrilling chaos New York is known for, I got that magic feeling of excitement again. Seeing all those people rushing to work, the newspaper and food vendors on the corner of the streets, the smoke coming out of the wells and all those yellow taxi's honking their horns made me forget all about my nerves at that moment.

After a warm reception by James Paul (hereafter JP) and my colleagues I was shown my desk and computer. Then I started reading my introduction map which included the instructions for my portofolio, the website, the office rules, my usernames and passwords, and my personal GPF cards. One of the things I read was that GPF aims to use a very direct and straightforward language in its texts. As interns we must avoid writing in vague, wordy and specialized terms as often used in the academia. The reason for this is that our texts and documents must remain accessible for the 'normal' public. I could not resist a smile on my face when I read that we should not use words such as 'conceptualize'. Then I had my first meeting with JP. He told me that my primary task would be to follow all latest developments on the topic of international justice. More specifically, this means that I will be searching for critical and analytical articles on the internet relating to the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals and the Special Courts and topics such as universal jurisdiction. I will then post these articles on our website and I will be fully in charge of the maintenance of this website section. JP also told me that I would get involved with the UN Security Council portofolio during a later stage of my internship. It all sounded good to me. When I applied for the internship position I was actually hoping to get one of these two portofolio's. 

I spend the rest of the day reading all my instructions and getting to know my colleagues better. As I wrote  earlier the interns all have differerent backgrounds in terms of country and education ranging from law to poltical science and sociology. The interns I work with are Joseph and Nicola for England, Joel from Canada, Trish and Denise from Australia, Duygu from Turkey, Segolene from France and Alice who is half French and half British. We all share a common workspace and the atmosphere in the office is low on stress and high on results. Everyone seems to get along very well and people meet regularly outside of work. That same day we had a dinner at Trish's place who lives one block away from me. Last saturday there was another social gathering at Duygu's place who is leaving us next week. It was really 'gezellig' as we say in Dutch on both occasions and my integration into the group has been very natural.

The remainder of the week I have mainly read a lot of documents in order to become familiar with my portofolio. Furthermore, I posted my first article on the website regarding the decision of the Appeals Chamber of the ICC to reverse the decision of the Pre-Trial Chamber not to include the crime of genocide in the arrest-warrant against President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. I have also tried to get my UN badge for entering the UN buildings, but the UN staff  were tossing me around the whole week. In other words, I got my first taste of 'UN bureaucracy'. 

On friday I attended my first NGO working group with the Security Council representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ivan Barbalic, and his staff. B&H is currently one of the non-permanent members of the SC. During this meeting the representative of B&H briefed representatives of NGO's such as Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and Security Council Report on all current topics on the agenda of the SC. The NGO representatives were allowed to ask questions about topics that concerned them. It was an interesting meeting, but in my view the respresentative of Bosnia circled around a lot of questions. His favourite answers were in the line of: "We are addressing that", "We are working on that", "We will look at that" etc. I suppose he is not allowed to give much information about matters discussed at Security Council meetings. My colleague Joel told me that other countries, especially big players like Russia and China, tend to be much worse in the non disclosure of information.  He told me this story in which a Russia representative during a meeting at his university answered a student question by simply saying that "These matters are not of your concern".