Theodor Meron appointed president of U.N.-created judicial body

Theodor MeronJudge Theodor Meron, Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus and Judicial Fellow, has been appointed president of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, after consultation with the president of the U.N. Security Council and the judges of the mechanism.

The mechanism was established in 2010 by the U.N. Security Council to complete the last of the prosecutions undertaken by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Meron has served as a judge on the Appeals Chamber for both tribunals since 2001, and will continue in his current position as president of the ICTY concurrently with his presidency of the new mechanism.  The mechanism will assume the work of the ICTR in July 2012, and of the ICTY in July 2013.

Meron discussed his experiences with the ICTY and ICTR and explained the new mechanism during a lecture at the Law School last October in which he asserted that the tribunals’ work had made “substantive contributions… to international criminal and humanitarian law.”

Posted on March 2, 2012