The Advisory Committee on Nominations of Judges (ACN) has concluded that it "could not make a conclusive determination regarding the criterion of 'high moral character'" for any of the fourteen candidates standing in the December 2026 election of six ICC judges, after the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM) delivered only a preliminary report in time for the Committee's assessment. The ACN's report of 5 August 2026 (para 19) confirms that the permanent vetting procedure the Assembly of States Parties adopted in 2023 did not function as designed — and analysis of the timeline suggests it never could have.

What does the ruling change?

Paragraph 23 of the 2023 due diligence procedure requires the IOM to conduct "an in-depth background check of criminal, academic and employment records of the candidates" and to convey the information to the ACN chair. For this election cycle, that obligation went unfulfilled in practice. The IOM's preliminary report reached the Committee only on 11 July; the ACN sat from 13 to 24 July and issued its report on 5 August, the date required by its mandate to transmit assessments to States Parties at least 16 weeks before the election. The final IOM report, which Dr Bury maintains had reached the Assembly President by the end of July, has not been published and played no part in the Committee's assessment.

Why did the vetting timeline collapse?

The failure was structural, not accidental. The nomination period opened on 5 January and was extended three times, the last extension on 28 April. Each extension moved the start of the vetting sequence while its end stayed fixed, so the vetting window absorbed the entire delay. The confidential channel for misconduct allegations, required to stay open at least 60 days, closed on 30 June — leaving the IOM eleven days before the Committee convened. Assessing credibility and putting allegations to candidates cannot be done in eleven days.

Paragraph 23 contains the design flaw: the IOM must submit its report "within the time period to be established for each election process" — but no mechanism compels that timeline to align with the ACN's. The 2025 Bureau-led facilitation report on the nomination and election process had already identified this structural gap, calling for "possible amendments to other mandates and procedures which may be necessary in order to implement the due diligence procedure for elected officials." Neither the Assembly, its President, nor the Bureau acted on it.

Is the IOM resourced to vet?

The IOM's operational capacity is critically depleted. Six staff oversee roughly 25 cases per investigator, against a benchmark of 8 to 12; investigations run 18 to 24 months; and inspections have been dormant since 2018. The 2027 budget provides only a one-off €50,000 consultancy top-up for vetting Registrar candidates — a stopgap, not a recurring capacity. The 2023 amendments did anticipate incomplete vetting, but only for specific, isolated cases, not for every candidate in an election.

The contrast with the removal of the ICC Prosecutor is stark: there, States Parties treated preserving high moral character in the OTP as justification for an unprecedented vote, while the same standard goes unverified in a judicial election.

What should practitioners watch?

The ACN has itself asked the Assembly to fix the gap by "establishing timelines for the preparation and transmission of due diligence reports by the IOM." Proposed remedies include:

• A default calendar calculated backwards from the ACN reporting deadline, with any nomination extension moving the entire sequence — or placing late nominations on a separate vetting track rather than shortening the IOM window.
• A mandatory ACN addendum on Article 36(3)(a) where a final IOM report arrives after the Committee's report, delivering a complete character assessment before the vote.
• A recurring, budgeted IOM vetting capacity and publication of its lessons-learned report.

Nothing in the 2026 sequence required bad faith. A timetable delegated and never set, extensions granted without downstream planning, and an unfunded mandate produced the outcome. Article 36(3)(a) of the Rome Statute requires judges "of high moral character, impartiality and integrity" — and, as the analysis puts it, the blank in paragraph 23 is the Assembly's own omission to correct, before the 2027 Registrar election and the prosecutorial election that follows repeat the same failure.