Meron Elected President of International Criminal Tribunal
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Theodore Meron, Charles L. Denison Professor of Law, was elected president of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), effective March 11, 2003. As part of his responsibilities, Meron will preside over the Appeals Chambers of the ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Meron was appointed as a judge on the ICTY in March 2001.
The ICTY, located in The Hague, Netherlands, was established by the U.N. Security Council in 1993 in the face of serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia beginning in 1991, and in response to the threat to international peace and security posed by these violations.
“We congratulate Ted Meron on this momentous achievement,” said Dean Revesz. “Ted’s scholarship, passion for justice, and knowledge of international human rights and humanitarian law have profoundly enriched the life of our institution during the last 26 years. Ted also exemplifies the Law School’s tradition of unprecedented leadership on international courts and tribunals.”
Born in Poland, Meron moved to Palestine and received his first legal training at the University of Jerusalem. Later, he attended Harvard Law School, earning his LL.M. and J.S.D., and Cambridge University, where he held the prestigious Humanitarian Trust Fellowship in International Law.
After Cambridge, Meron joined the Israeli foreign ministry. He was counselor to the mission to the United Nations in New York, legal adviser to the Ministry, ambassador to Canada, and permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva. He resigned from the Israeli Foreign Service in 1977 and immediately joined NYU School of Law. Since then, he has become a naturalized U.S. citizen and served as a public member of the U.S. delegation to the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe and Conference on Human Dimension in Copenhagen. He was counselor on international law in the U.S. Department of State in 2000-01. Between 1991 and 1995, he also held a professorship of international law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
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