Theodor Meron - Biography

Theodor Meron (born 28 April 1930) was the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) until 2005, and now serves as a judge on the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICTY. On October 19, 2011, he was elected to a second two-year term as President of the ICTY, starting November 17, 2011. He also serves as Honorary President of the American Society of International Law.

Born in Kalisz, Poland, Judge Meron received his legal education at the Hebrew University (M.J.), Harvard Law School (LL.M., J.S.D.) and Cambridge University (Diploma in Public International Law). Since 1977, he has been a Professor of International Law and, since 1994, the holder of the Charles L. Denison Chair at New York University School of Law. In 2000-2001, he served as Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State.

Judge Meron is a member of the Institute of International Law, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Shakespeare Institute among other organizations. He was awarded the 2005 Rule of Law Award by the International Bar Association and the 2006 Manley O. Hudson Medal of the American Society of International Law. He was made Officer of the Legion of Honor by the government of France in 2007. He received the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2008. In 2009, Judge Meron was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded a doctorate of law honoris causa by the University of Warsaw in 2011.

In the late 1960s, Judge Meron was legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and wrote a secret 1967 memo

for Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who was considering creating an Israeli settlement at Kfar Etzion. This was just after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Judge Meron's memo concluded that creating new settlements in the Occupied Territories would be a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Eshkol went ahead to create the settlement anyway, and therefore set the conditions which began the Movement for Greater Israel and Israel's settlement enterprise.

Judge Meron's books include: Investment Insurance in International Law (Oceana-Sijthoff, 1976); The United Nations Secretariat (Lexington Books, 1977); Human Rights in International Law (Oxford University Press, 1984); Human Rights Law-Making in the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 1986) (awarded the certificate of merit of the American Society of International Law); Human Rights in Internal Strife: Their International Protection (Sir Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures, Grotius Publications, 1987); Human Rights and Humanitarian Norms as Customary Law (Oxford University Press, 1989); Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws (Oxford University Press, 1993); Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1998); War Crimes Law Comes of Age: Essays (Oxford University Press, 1998), International Law In the Age of Human Rights (Martinus Nijhoff, 2004), and The Humanization of International Law (Hague Academy of International Law and Nijhoff, 2006). His latest book, a selection of his speeches entitled The Making of International Justice: A View from the Bench, appeared in 2011 (Oxford University Press).

External links

• Official web page at New York University