Event Description: A 60 minute seminar evaluating the common law jury system for fact finding in criminal litigation. The event will be presented by an English Queen’s Counsel, recently appointed a Crown Court Judge. Participants will be invited to join interactive discussion and explore their own understandings of how factual findings can best be made in criminal cases.

The link for connection https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83929213093

Questions for Discussion: Topics to be touched on include: the competence of lay people to determine factual issues in criminal proceedings, the effects that operating in a jury system have on advocates and judges, the possibility of bias or partisan sympathy distorting jury verdicts, the need for ‘admissibility’ challenges in a jury system, the possibility of jury tampering and the value of citizen participation in the justice system.

Ben Gumpert was until May 2020 an English barrister practising in criminal law. He has recently been appointed a full time judge. Barristers take cases both for the prosecution and the defence. Senior barristers also sit as part time judges. Ben prosecuted and defended organised crimes cases, murders, serious sexual offences and, notably, the first modern slavery case brought before the English criminal courts. Internationally he defended a Rwandan cabinet minister accused of genocide and prosecuted the President of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta, and also one of the Ugandan LRA leaders Dominic Ongwen. He has trained hundreds of students and practitioners in international criminal law and advocacy in locations around the world including Baghdad, Barcelona, Berlin, Colombo, Kampala, and Quebec.

Yulia Nuzban is a Ukrainian lawyer, who has worked on investigation and prosecution of several cases at the International Criminal Court based in the Netherlands. In the past, she has worked with a law firm in Ukraine, human rights organisations in Ukraine and Poland, research and historical institutes in the Netherlands and Poland, and an international criminal defence team in the Netherlands.

 Registration is required to participate.

For more information about the event, please contact the UBA Secretariat at: +380 (44) 492-88-48, e-mail: komitet@uba.ua. Contact person – Viktoriia Motia.