The Government has nominated Judge Maureen Harding Clark as a candidate for election to the International Criminal Court.
Judge Harding Clark is currently working as an ad litem judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. She was elected by the United Nations to join the panel of part-time judges there last year.
She has experience in criminal and international humanitarian law and particular expertise in the area of sexual and other violent offences against women and children.
Judge Harding Clark was called to the Bar in 1975, when there were only about 20 women barristers. Unusually, too, for a woman then, she practised criminal law.
She joined the south-eastern circuit, the only woman on circuit at that time. She became State prosecutor for Tipperary in 1985, a position she held until she became a senior counsel in 1991.
She continued to prosecute for the State in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin, and among the trials she prosecuted were the first male rape trial and the first marital rape trial. She was also the lead counsel in the first money-laundering trial in the State.
She later represented the Attorney General at the beginning of the Lindsay Tribunal.
Ireland became one of the founding states of the ICC when it formally ratified the Rome Statute in April this year. This allowed the State, and other founding states, to nominate judge candidates to the court.
The election of judges will be held at the UN in New York next February.
Yesterday the Irish Section of Amnesty International commended the Government on its nomination.