Theodor Meron


Theodor Meron is a former President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Presiding Judge of the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICTY. He was elected President of the ICTY by his fellow judges on 19 October 2011, and again on 1 October 2013.
Meron previously served as President of the ICTY from 2003-05. On 20 December 2011, he was elected as a Judge of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. On 29 February 2012, he was appointed President of the Mechanism for a four-year term, starting 1 March 2012. He was appointed to a second term as President effective 1 March 2016 and, subsequently, to a third term as President effective 1 July 2018 and through 18 January 2019.
Having served four terms as President of the ICTY and three terms as President of the Mechanism since he was first elected to the bench in 2001, Meron continues to serve as a Judge of the Mechanism.
In 2019, he was appointed Honorary Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, for services to criminal justice and international humanitarian law.

Early life

Born in Kalisz, Poland, Meron received his legal education at the Hebrew University, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University. He immigrated to the United States in 1978 and is a citizen of the United States and of no other country.

Legal career

Prior to his immigration to the United States, Meron was a legal adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Starting in 1977, he has served as a Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and UC Berkeley, and a Professor of International Law at New York University School of Law, where he was named the Charles L. Denison Chair at New York University School of Law in 1994. In 2000-01 he served as Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State. In 2006 he was named Charles L. Denison Professor Emeritus and Judicial Fellow at New York University School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University since 2014, a visiting fellow at Mansfield College, and an academic associate at the Bonavero Human Rights Institute. In May 2019, he was elected Honorary Visiting Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
In 1990, Meron 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 U.S. Delegation to the Rome Conference on the establishment of an International Criminal Court. He served on several committees of experts of the ICRC, on Internal Strife, on Environment and Armed Conflicts, and on Customary Rules of International Humanitarian Law. He co-leads the annual ICRC-NYU seminars on international humanitarian law for UN diplomats.
Meron is a member of the Institute of International Law and the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Honorary President of the American Society of International Law. He has also served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International 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 an Officer of the Legion of Honor by the President of the French Republic in 2007. He received the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2008. In 2009, Meron was elected to the . He was awarded a LLD honoris causa by the University of Warsaw in 2011 and in 2017 he was made Officer of the Order of Merit of Poland. He was also named "Grand Officier" of the National Order of Merit by the President of France in 2014. For service to criminal justice and international Humanitarian Law, Queen Elizabeth II made him an Honorary Companion of "the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George" in 2019. That same year, he was also one of 17 honorees selected by One Young World and Vanity Fair for the inaugural Global Lists List, cited for his contributions "for peace, justice and strong institutions".

ICTY controversies

In June 2013, Judge Frederik Harhoff of Denmark, a judge at the ICTY, circulated a letter saying that Meron had pressured other judges into acquitting Serb and Croat commanders. The letter, which repeated complaints by other legal scholars, claimed Meron had raised the degree of responsibility that senior military leaders should bear for war crimes committed by their subordinates, to the point where it a conviction has become nearly impossible. They blamed Meron, whom they identified as an American, for the acquittals of top Serb and Croat commanders.
In August 2013, a chamber appointed by the ICTY Vice-President found by majority that Judge Harhoff had demonstrated an unacceptable appearance of bias in favour of conviction. Harhoff was therefore disqualified from the case of Vojislav Šešelj. The decision followed a defence motion seeking the disqualification of Harhoff on the basis of Judge Harhoff's letter. Following the decision on his disqualification for bias, Harhoff, who was an ad litem judge, had to leave the ICTY.
In the Judgment of the International Court of Justice of 3 February 2015, the Court, which is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, expressed agreement with the ICTY majority judgement in the case of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač, which was at the center of Harhoff's criticism of Meron, who presided over the Gotovina and Markač appeal.
The National Commission for the Fight against Genocide of Rwanda called for the resignation of Meron, who was accused of influencing court decisions by exerting undue influence on judges to let high-profile war crimes suspects go free. The Executive Secretary of the CNLG, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, has stated permitting these decisions could have "disastrous consequences for the current and future cases of international war crimes, for truth and justice in the world, for peace and tolerance, and for human rights and freedoms."
Meron and other judges reversed convictions and reduced considerably the sentences of Col. Theoneste Bagosora, who is accused of masterminding the 1994 Hutu Genocide against the Tutsi, which resulted in 800,000 to 1 million deaths, from life in prison to 35 years. The judges reduced the sentence of the second in command, Lt. Col. Anatole Nsengiyumva, from life to time served ; he was released June 2013. Meron was accused of leading acquittals of Hutus Protais Zigiranyirazo in November 2009 and, recently, Justin Mugenzi and Prosper Mugiraneza, all senior officials of the genocidal regime.

Legal opinion on settlements in the occupied territories

In the late 1960s, Meron was legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and wrote a secret 1967 memo for Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who was considering creating an Israeli settlement at Kfar Etzion. This was just after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Meron's memo concluded that creating new settlements in the Occupied Territories would be a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Eshkol created the settlements anyway.

Works

Meron's books include:
Meron is among the editors of .

Lectures

in the