A conversation with... O Gon Kwon

O-Gon Kwon is an attorney-at-law at Kim & Chang and serves as the president of the firm’s International Law Institute. Kwon is currently serving as the President of the Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) from December 2017 for a term of three years. He is also serving as the President of the Korean Society of Law, which is the association of all jurists in Korea, and as the Chair of the Judicial Policy Management Committee of the Judicial Policy Research Institute of the Supreme Court of Korea. Additionally, Kwon has also been serving as a member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press) since 2007. Before joining Kim & Chang in May 2016, Kwon worked as one of the permanent judges of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from November 2001 until March 2016. He served as the Vice-President of the ICTY from 2008 to 2011. During his mandate at the ICTY, Kwon presided over the trial of former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžic, the judgment of which was delivered on 24 March 2016. Previously, he sat on the trial of Slobodan Miloševic, former President of the Republic of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and on the trial of Popovic and others, in which seven Bosnian Serbs were accused of involvement in crimes following the July 1995 fall of the Srebrenica enclave. He also served as a member of the Independent Panel on the International Criminal Court Judicial Election, which was established by the Coalition for the ICC, from 2010 to 2012.