Kai Ambos was born in Heidelberg. He studied Law and Political sciences at Freiburg i.B., Oxford and Munich, where he passed his Level I law exams in 1990. His doctorate, also received from Munich University, and supervised by Horst Schüler-Springorum, followed just two years later. His dissertation, subsequently published under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute, concerned problems of drug control in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. On 27 October 1997 he received the "Law and Development Prize" from the "Herbert Krüger foundation for overseas constitutional comparison" for it. Meanwhile, he passed his Level II law exams in 1994. After that he worked as an academic research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for foreign and international criminal law and as an academic research assistant at Freiburg University under the direction of Prof. Dr. Albin Eser, with whom he has subsequently collaborated on a succession of academic projects. In 2001 his habilitation was awarded by Munich University. It was supervised by Profs. Klaus Volk and Simma, and addressed "General aspects of International criminal law". It was subsequently published. The habilitation cleared the way for a lifelong career in the universities sector and he accepted a teaching chair at the University of Freiburg. That appointment was a relatively brief one, however, since at the start of 2003 he moved to Göttingen where he continues to occupy the teaching chair in criminal law, criminal procedure, comparative law and international criminal law. Kai Ambos served as a judge in the district court in Göttingen for more than ten years, his appointment taking effect on 24 March 2006. Beyond the academic world, he came to national and international attention as a member of the defence team for Mladen Markač at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the case of "Gorovina and others". More than ten years after the official indictment, on 16 November 2012, the case ended, on appeal, with an acquittal for Markač and his co-defendants, by a majority verdict of the panel judges. The outcome gave rise to much media discussion: Ambos himself admitted that he had been very much surprised by the eleventh hour acquittal. In 2013 Ambos received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana in northern Peru for "services to criminal justice and criminal process and his commitment to reform of the justice systems in Peru and other Latin American countries". In January 2014 a "Research Centre for Latina American criminal law and criminal procedure" was inaugurated at Göttingen under the auspices of Ambos' professorship. He serves currently as its "Director General". The research centre is supported by its own academic advisory council and a specialist library containing more than 12,000 titles. On 7 February 2017 Ambos was appointed to serve as a judge on the Special Tribunal for Kosovo at the InternationalCourt of Justice in The Hague.
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In 2012 Kai Ambos argued that the "misuse" by the Ecuadorian government of its London embassy to protect Julian Assange from prosecution in Sweden in respect of rape charges was a breach of human rights. Pointing out that Assange had been able to arrange matters so that it had taken three English courts a year and a half to reach the point at which they were about to extradite Assange, Ambos went on to highlight ways in which the parties had been able to politicise the affair, and he set out ways in which the case highlighted that in practice the European Arrest Warrant system was being implemented very much more robustly in some member states than in others. In 2015 he addressed the matter of the so-called Armenian Genocide. Setting aside the continuing heated debates over whether the term was "politically correct", he invited consideration of whether it was "legally correct", pointing out that the necessity to prove "destructive intent" on the part of the Ottoman government presented formidable challenges.
