Backgrounder
Payam Akhavan (LLB, Osgoode Hall Law School, 1989; LLM SJD, Harvard Law School, 1990), is a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College and a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague.
Payam Akhavan (LLB, Osgoode Hall Law School, 1989; LLM SJD, Harvard Law School, 1990), is a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College and a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague. He was previously full professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, with prior appointments at Yale Law School, Oxford University, University Paris Nanterre, the European University Institute and Leiden University. He has published extensively on international criminal law, and in 2017 he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures. Professor Akhavan was the first legal advisor to the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and also served with the UN in Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda and Timor Leste. He has served as counsel in notable cases before the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, including the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar) regarding the persecuted Rohingya minority. His human rights work has been featured in The New York Times, the BBC’s Hardtalk, the CBC’s Ideas, Maclean’s and other media.