Prof. Hilmi M. Zawati, D.C.L., Ph.D., born in Nablus in 1953, is currently the Chair of the International Centre for Legal Accountability and Justice (ICLAJ), an international criminal law jurist and human rights advocate. He has studied law at different American, Canadian, Middle Eastern, and African universities, and earned several law degrees, including the prestigious doctor of civil law (D.C.L.) in international comparative law (McGill), M.A. in comparative law (McGill), Ph.D. in international energy political economics (CPU), M.A. in Islamic law of nations (Punjab), Post-Graduate Diploma in public law (Khartoum), and LL.B. (Alexandria-Beirut campus).
Before Joining ICLAJ, Prof. Zawati served as the President of the International Legal Advocacy Forum (ILAF). Over the past thirty years, he has taught numerous subjects at both Kuwait University and Bishop’s University, and been a prominent speaker and author on a number of hotly debated legal issues. During the past decade or so, he organized, co-chaired, and participated in several international conferences and addressed major academic and professional gatherings in a number of Middle Eastern countries, Africa, Europe, and at home in Canada.
Dr. Zawati has an accomplished body of trans-disciplinary scholarship. Over the past 40 years, he published 24 books and tens of articles in both Arabic and English. His present primary research and teaching areas are: public international law; international criminal law; international humanitarian and human rights law; international gender justice system; international environmental law of armed conflict; and Islamic law of nations (siyar).
Prof. Zawati has been a committed human rights activist over the last three decades and has actively advocated human rights of wartime rape victims throughout the world ever since the first reports of war crimes during the Yugoslav dissolution war of 1992-1995. He is also the author of several prize-winning books on international humanitarian and human rights law, including his recent book The Triumph of Ethnic Hatred and the Failure of International Political Will: Gendered Violence and Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). Dr. Zawati’s most recent work is his book Fair Labelling and the Dilemma of Prosecuting Gender-Based Crimes at the International Criminal Tribunals (Oxford University Press, 2014).
As a well-established poet, playwright, and novelist, Prof. Zawati’s literary works have been translated into several languages and made the focus of research in a number of M.A. and Ph.D. dissertations.
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