Mónica Feria Tinta


Mónica Feria Tinta is a leading public international lawyer at the Bar of England & Wales. She practises as a barrister from 20 Essex Street Chambers. "The Lawyer" magazine featured her in its "Hot 100" 2020 list, as amongst “the most daring, innovative and creative lawyers” in the United Kingdom. In 2000 she became the first and only Peruvian-born lawyer to receive the Diploma of The Hague Academy of International Law in history, the year Professor Pierre-Marie Dupuy delivered the General Course. Her litigation work led to the first international human rights court decision ordering the prosecution of a former Head of State for crimes under international law. In 2006 she was awarded the Inge Genefke International Award for her work as an international lawyer and in 2007 she became the youngest lawyer to be awarded the Gruber Justice Prize, for her contributions advancing the cause of justice as delivered through the legal system; an honour she received at a ceremony chaired by US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Washington DC.
Among the members of the selection panel awarding the Justice Prize that year was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor from the US Supreme Court. Past awardees of the Gruber Justice Prize include Thomas Buergenthal, Arthur Chaskalson, Michael Kirby, and Justice Rosalie Abella.
Feria-Tinta has the distinction of being the first Latin American lawyer to be Called to and practising at the Bar of England and Wales. She is also a member of the American Society of International Law. In 2019 she was amongst the 64 distinguished women barristers selected to feature in the celebratory exhibition of a Century of Women in Law at the Middle Temple. The exhibition marked 100 years since women were permitted to enter the legal profession in England & Wales, led by Helena Normanton, the first woman to practise as a barrister in England.
More recently she made news as acting Counsel in the first-world climate change litigation brought by peoples in low-lying islands against a State, before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the Torres Strait Islanders case.

Education and career

Feria-Tinta studied international law at the London School of Economics receiving her LL.M with merit in 1996. She received further training at the Institut International des Droits de l'Homme in Strasbourg and at the Institute of Human Rights of the Abo Academy in Turko under the sponsorship of the European Commission and the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2001. In 2000 she was among the 24 lawyers selected worldwide to be trained by members of the International Law Commission in all areas of General International Law, taking part in the thirty-sixth session of the International Law Seminar in Geneva, pursuant to General Assembly resolution 54/111, under a United Nations Fellowship. Her areas of expertise include international dispute settlement, immunities, treaty law, recognition of state and governments under international law, self-determination under international law, boundary delimitation, law of the sea, territory, investment law, human rights, use of force, laws of war, State Responsibility ; command responsibility for gross human rights violations; victim rights under international law.
After teaching Public International Law at the London School of Economics as a Teaching Assistant to Sir Christopher Greenwood, Feria-Tinta spent a year as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, at the time under the Directorship of former Whewell Professor of International Law, James Crawford.
As a practising lawyer Monica Feria-Tinta has advised States, state-owned entities, non self-governing peoples, governments in exile, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, indigenous peoples, companies, and individuals, in the area of public international law. She started her practising career working for international tribunals; first at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and a year later, at the International Court of Justice, gaining experience in the adjudication of complex international litigation both entailing individual international criminal responsibility and State responsibility. She acted as legal advisor for a State Delegation taking part in the negotiations of the Rome Statute, at the Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court in Rome. In litigation, she has appeared as counsel before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and has advised parties before the International Court of Justice, International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, UN CEDAW Committee, Court of Appeal and Court of Appeal. Expert opinions provided in different international fora have included an Amicus Curiae to the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a joint Amicus Curiae with Professor John Dugard for the Appeals Court of Amsterdam, in the Bouterse case, and expert comments on behalf of the Redress Trust to the Final Report of the UN Independent Expert on the Right of Reparation for Victims of Serious Violations of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Cherif Bassiouni.
Her advocacy work before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights contributed to pivotal changes in the Inter-American regional system.
Monica Feria-Tinta pioneered the rights of victims in the Inter-American system challenging for the first time the use of State appointed Ad hoc Judges in individual petitions before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which led to the end of a practice that had existed for nearly two decades. She also advocated for the need of a Victims' Fund for legal aid before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to ensure access to justice and equality of arms for victims. A Victims Legal Assistance Fund before the ICHR was finally created in 2010.
She litigated the first international human rights case in the world on the protection of the rights of the child in times of war and obtained the first international binding decision on gender justice in the history of adjudication of the Inter-American region, initiating the feminisation of human rights law in the Americas. Feria's litigation work marked a before, and an after, in the manner in which the American Convention on Human Rights is interpreted and applied. In particular, she introduced a gender perspective in the interpretation of human rights in the Americas, which the Inter-American Court on Human Rights upheld, and has followed since. She secured the first finding of rape by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as a violation of the American Convention on Human Rights, and brought the definition of rape in the Americas in line with international law. In addition, Feria Tinta's pleadings prompted the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to hold a State accountable for violations of the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women for the first time in eleven years, since its entry into force. Most notably, her litigation work on behalf of hundreds of prisoners led to a landmark case on prisoners' rights where the Inter-American Court ruled on a massacre taking place in a prison and on torture practices that had never been tested before an international human rights tribunal, ordering as a consequence, the prosecution of a former Head of State for crimes against humanity.
Her forensic experience investigating and documenting torture in international contentious cases, was used as model to train advocates worldwide, representing victims of torture, by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.
In 2009 she was commissioned to take part on a project by UNESCO entitled "Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Law's Duty to the Poor" contributing with a thorough study on litigation in Regional Human Rights Systems on the justiciability of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Feria Tinta has been a speaker in International law in different fora worldwide including Lancaster House, the Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, the University of Oxford, the United Nations, Trinity College, Dublin, the British Institute of Comparative and International Law, Universidad de los Andes Law Faculty, and Georgetown University Law Center. She has been a guest lecturer at Guangxi Normal University, Faculty of Law, China, University of Cambridge and at the Master Program of the Institute Universitaire Kurt Bosch-University of Fribourg, Switzerland.
She has taken part in expert missions to Guatemala Myanmar and has trained advocates on international law in South Africa, Colombian lawyers on judicial processes in the context of transitional justice and members of the Honduran Bar on international arbitration.
In 2018, Feria-Tinta was appointed to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Commission on Environmental Law, the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it.

Cases

Arbitral appointments include:-
Selected Cases include:-