IBA Annual Conference Seoul 2019
22 Sep - 27 Sep 2019
Room 401, Floor 4
Session information
A conversation with... O-Gon Kwon
Wednesday 25 September (1315 - 1415)
Description
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. Prior to his international career, Kwon served in the judiciary of the Republic of Korea for 22 years as a judge in various courts, including the Seoul District Court, Changwon District Court, Suwon District Court and Taegu High Court. He also served as the Assistant Legal Advisor to the President of the Republic of Korea (1981-1984), the Planning Director at the Office of the Court Administration of the Supreme Court of Korea (1990-1992), and the Director of Research at the Constitutional Court of Korea (1997-1999). Kwon holds an LLB (1976) from Seoul National University College of Law and an LLM (1983) from the Graduate School of Seoul National University. He took his bar apprenticeship in the Judicial Research and Training Institute at the Supreme Court of Korea (1979). He also holds an LLM (1985) from Harvard Law School, USA. Kwon received a Moran Medal, Order of Civil Merit, from the President of the Republic of Korea in September 2008. He also received the Korean Legal Culture Award from the Korean Bar Association in 2013 and the Youngsan Legal Culture Award from the Youngsan Foundation of Law & Culture in 2011. Further, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Asialaw in 2017 and Kyungam Award in 2018. He was also nominated as the Lawyer of the Year by the Legal Press Club in 2009.