(Member of the Tribunal as of 17 November 2001)
Since his election to the Tribunal by the U.N. General Assembly in March 2001, Judge Meron has served on the Appeals Chamber. Between March 2003 and November 2005 he served as President of the Tribunal.
Since 1977, Judge Meron has been a Professor of International Law and, since 1994, the holder of the Charles L. Denison Chair at New York University Law School. In 2000-2001, he served as Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State. Between 1991 and 1995 he was also Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and he has been a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard and at the University of California (Berkeley).
Judge Meron received his legal education at the Universities of Jerusalem, Harvard (where he received his doctorate), and Cambridge.
He was Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law (1993-98) and is now an honorary editor. He is a member of the Institute of International Law. the Board of Editors of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he is a patron of the American Society of International Law, the French Society of International Law, the American Branch of the International Law Association, the Bar of the State of New York, and of the Shakespeare Institute. He has served on the advisory committees or boards of several human rights organizations, including Americas Watch and the International League for Human Rights. In 1990, he served as a Public Member of the United States Delegation to the CSCE Conference on Human Dimensions in Copenhagen. In 1998, he served as a member of the United States Delegation to the Rome Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) and was involved in the drafting of the provisions on crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has also served on the preparatory commission for the establishment of the ICC, with particular responsibilities for the definition of the crime of aggression. He has served on several committees of experts of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and was also a member of the steering committee of ICRC experts on Customary Rules of International Humanitarian Law. He is a member of the “Panel of Eminent Persons within the Swiss Initiative to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which is preparing a future agenda for human rights.
He has been a Carnegie Lecturer at The Hague Academy of International Law, Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Planck Institute Fellow (Heidelberg), Sir Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was the Marek Nowicki Lecturer for 2008 lectures in Budapest and Warsaw under the auspices of the Open Society Institute.
He helped establish the ICRC/Graduate Institute of International Studies seminars for University Professors on International Humanitarian Law.
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 2007. He received the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2008. In 2009 he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Judge Meron has published extensively. His books are: 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), and International Law In the Age of Human Rights (Martinus Nijhoff 2004). His latest book “The Humanization of International Law” appeared in 2006 (Hague Academy of International Law and Nijhoff).
A frequent contributor to the American Journal of International Law and other legal journals, he delivered the 2003 General Course of Public International Law at The Hague Academy of International Law.