Following on from discussions held at the 5th Annual Conference of the IBA War Crimes Committee, we will hold a conversation with the Heads of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), and United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh (UNITAD), to track progress in their operations, and to identify challenges and opportunities for this new generation of accountability mechanisms.
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Federica D´Alessandra Oxford Institute for Ethics Law and Armed Conflict, Oxford; Advisory Board Member, IBA War Crimes Committee; Co-Chair, IBA Human Rights Law Committee
Ambassador Stephen Rapp Senior Visiting Fellow of Practice, Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford; Member, IBA War Crimes Committee Advisory Board
Founding Executive Director of the Oxford Program on International Peace and Security, Oxford Blavatnik School of Government. Member of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC), and the Oxford Bonavero Institute for Human Rights. Previously Benjamin Ferencz Fellow at Harvard. Laws of armed conflict, international organizations law, international criminal law, international human rights law, foreign relations law, national security, leadership, global governance and the rule of law.
Currently co-Chair of the International Bar Association's War Crimes Committee and Human Rights Law Committee. Council Member, IBA Section on Public and Professional Interest and IBA Human Rights Institute.
Karim Khan QC
Karim A. A. Khan QC is an Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and serves as the Special Adviser and Head of the Investigative Team established pursuant to Security Council resolution 2379 (2017), to promote accountability efforts for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by Da’esh/ISIL.
Karim is a barrister and Queen’s Counsel with more than 25 years of professional experience as an international criminal law and human rights lawyer. He has extensive experience as a prosecutor, victim’s counsel and defence lawyer in domestic and international criminal tribunals, including, but not limited to, the International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. He has also represented victims of human rights violations in Africa and Asia. Karim was elected as the second President of the ICC Bar Association in July 2017 and is a worldwide Ambassador of the African Bar Association. He has published a number of leading texts on international criminal law and is the co-author of Archbold ‘International Criminal Courts’, now in US 5th edition.
The holder of a Bachelor of Laws degree with Honours from King’s College, University of London, and holds various other degrees and qualifications.
Nicholas Koumjian
Mr. Koumjian is the first Head of the Myanmar Mechanism, which was established by the Human Rights Council on 27 September 2018, and welcomed by the General Assembly on 22 December 2018.
Mr. Koumjian has over 35 years of experience as Prosecutor, including almost 20 years of experience in the field of international criminal justice. Since November 2013, he has been serving as the International Co-Prosecutor for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Mr. Koumjian previously served as Trial Attorney at the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, as Deputy General Prosecutor for serious crimes in Timor-Leste, as International Prosecutor in the War Crimes Section of the Prosecutor’s Office for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and as Principal Trial Attorney and Senior Appeals Counsel in the Special Court for Sierra Leone. In addition, he also worked as a Prosecutor in the United States and has professional experience in the fields of international human rights law and transitional justice.
Mr. Koumjian holds a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of North Carolina and a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Catherine Marchi-Uhel
Ms. Marchi-Uhel is the first Head of the Mechanism established by the General Assembly on 21 December 2016. She brings to the position more than 27 years of experience in the judiciary and in public service — including with the United Nations — in the fields of criminal law, transitional justice and human rights. Since 2015, she has been the Ombudsperson for the Security Council Committee pursuant to resolutions 1267 (1999), 1989 (2011) and 2253 (2015) concerning Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh), Al-Qaida and associated individuals, groups, undertakings and entities. Previously a judge in France, Ms. Marchi-Uhel served in the same capacity with the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. She was Senior Legal Officer and Head of Chambers at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and also held legal positions in France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and with United Nations peacekeeping missions. Ms. Marchi-Uhel holds a Master’s degree in law from the University of Caen.
Ambassador Stephen Rapp
Stephen Rapp is Senior Visiting Fellow of Practice with the Blavatnik School’s Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict’s Programme on International Peace and Security. At the Blavatnik School, he is co-leading – with Federica D’Alessandra – a new research and stakeholder consultation project to develop policy proposals to strengthen global capacity to gather and preserve evidence of criminal responsibility of the most serious violations of human rights.
He also currently serves as Distinguished Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Prevention of Genocide, and as Chair of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which has collected and analysed more than 750,000 pages of documentation from Syria and Iraq to prepare cases for future prosecution.
From 2009 to 2015, he was Ambassador-at-Large heading the Office of Global Criminal Justice in the US State Department. During his tenure, he travelled more than 1.5 million miles to 87 countries to engage with victims, civil society organisations, investigators and prosecutors, and the leaders of governments and international bodies to further efforts to bring the perpetrators of mass atrocities to justice.
Ambassador Rapp was the Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2009, where he led the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. From 2001 to 2007, he served as Senior Trial Attorney and Chief of Prosecutions at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he headed the trial team that achieved the first convictions in history of leaders of the mass media for the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide.
Before becoming an international prosecutor, he was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa from 1993 to 2001. He received a BA degree from Harvard, a JD degree from Drake, and several honourary degrees from US universities in recognition of his work for international criminal justice.