Recently, the organizing committee of the ICC Chinese Moot Court Competition announced the winners of the 2021 ICC Chinese Moot Court Competition, and our ICC Moot Team won the third prize nationwide from the teams of 72 universities, and the team captain Wang Yiqin was awarded the title of the top ten trial lawyers among prosecutors. The team members who participated in the courtroom defense were Wang Yiqin (undergraduate student of Grade 2017), He Manqian (undergraduate student of Grade 2017), Li Chanjuan (undergraduate student of Grade 2017), Zhang Sihui (undergraduate student of Grade 2018), and Wang Yuanyuan (graduate student of Grade 2020), with Ms. Lv Qi from the International Law Teaching and Research Section of our college as the coach.
The competition was divided into two parts: writ writing and court debate. In writ writing the top 45 teams in the ranking were qualified to participate in the court debate. During the pre-selection stage, our ICC Moot Team actively prepared for the competition. During the winter break, with the help of instructors, they conducted several case discussions and document revision meetings, and revised more than ten drafts. In the end, they completed the writ writing task in high quality and successfully entered the main round of courtroom debate.
In the main round of the courtroom debate on April 17, our ICC Moot Team members had a fierce battle with six teams from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shenzhen University and Macau University of Science and Technology, etc. They calmly and methodically responded to the tough questions from the debating side and the professional judges, and finally achieved the third prize nationwide.
Captain Wang Yiqin said, "Faced with a large number of graduate students from other schools in the lineup, the pressure was indeed relatively high. The timeline of the trial of ICC cases are very long, so every team member read the cases every day until the early morning during the week near the main competition. Since we had no experience in the main competition, all we could do was to read as many cases as possible and do more analysis. But fortunately, we have made it."
It is reported that the ICC Chinese Moot Court Competition organized by the Center for the Promotion of International Law is a moot court competition conducted under the auspices of the International Criminal Court in accordance with the substantive and procedural rules of the ICC, and is the only international law moot court competition with Chinese as the competition language. The competition drew up questions in the context of the current issues of widespread concern in the international community, guiding students to study and research international criminal law, learn to apply the ICC procedural rules, and improve their law research and court debate level. The competition brings the most cutting-edge concepts, jurisprudence and cases in international and criminal law to China, and introduces Chinese thinking, notions and traditions of rule of law to the world.
A total of 72 university teams registered for the ICC Chinese Moot Court Competition this year, hitting an all-time high. Our ICC Moot Team with its good legal literacy, excellent court debate level, complementary and mutually supportive team spirit and calm and collected psychological quality has won the impressive achievement of third prize nationwide in the ICC Chinese Competition for two consecutive years since its inception in 2019. Our ICC Moot Team will continue to maintain its enthusiasm for international criminal law, study hard and prepare actively for the competition, and strive to achieve even better results in future competitions!
Translator: Yang Fan
Date: May 19, 2021
