played a central role in the early years of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh's regime, being chosen as his Solicitor General and legal adviser in 1996, after he took power in the 1994 Gambian coup d'état. She became Minister of Justice and Attorney General in August 1998, but was dismissed from both posts in March 2000. She has been criticised in The Gambia for her role in the dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh. and has denied the responsibility for her prosecutions and the cases of torture under the regime she was a part of. Yahya Jammeh's former regime was accused by human rights groups of various abuses. He is notably accused of harassing the opposition and the press, after the coup in 1994. International criminal prosecutor and legal adviser Bensouda's international career as a non-government civil servant began at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she worked as a legal adviser and a trial attorney before rising to the position of senior legal adviser and head of the Legal Advisory Unit (May 2002 to August 2004). On 8 August 2004, she was elected as Deputy Prosecutor (Prosecutions) with an overwhelming majority of votes by the Assembly of State Parties of the International Criminal Court. On 1 November 2004, she was sworn into Office as Deputy Prosecutor (Prosecutions). On 1 December 2011, the Assembly of States Parties of the ICC announced that an informal agreement had been reached to make Bensouda the consensus choice to succeed Luis Moreno-Ocampo as Prosecutor of the ICC. She was formally elected by consensus on 12 December 2011. Her term as prosecutor began on 15 June 2012. According to an Associated Press report on 6 November 2015, Bensouda was advised that war crimes may have been committed on the ship Mavi Marmara in 2010, when eight Turks and one Turkish-American were killed and several other activists were wounded by Israeli commandos, but she ruled that the case was not serious enough to merit an investigation on behalf of the ICC. In November 2017, Bensouda advised the ICC to consider seeking charges for human rights abuses committed during the War in Afghanistan such as alleged rapes and torture by the United States Armed Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency, crime against humanity committed by the Taliban, and war crimes committed by the Afghan National Security Forces. John Bolton, National Security Advisor of the United States, claimed that the