Payam Akhavan is Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He received his Master of Law and Doctor of the Science of Jurisprudence from Harvard Law School and was previously Senior Fellow at Yale Law School, Leiden University, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto.

 

Professor Akhavan was the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at The Hague (1994-2000) and has served with the United Nations in Cambodia, East Timor, and Guatemala. He has appeared as counsel in leading cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. He has also served on the Board of Directors of several human rights organizations and his work has been featured in the New York Times. In 2005, he was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.

 

Professor Akhavan has published extensively on international criminal law, and his article “Beyond Impunity: Can International Criminal Justice Prevent Future Atrocities?” in the American Journal of International Law (2001) was selected by the International Library of Law and Legal Theory as one of “the most significant published journal essays in contemporary legal studies.” He is also the author of the Report on the Work of the Office of the Special Advisor of the United Nations Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide (2005), served as Chairman of the Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide (2007), and is Co-Producer of the documentary film “Genos.Cide: The Great Challenge” (2009).