Francis Boyle

Francis Anthony Boyle (born March 25, 1950) is an American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law.

He has served as counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina and has supported the rights of Palestinians and indigenous peoples.

Boyle has stated that he "was born Irish", and does not consider himself to be a "White North American".

He received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Chicago in 1971.

He earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1976 and Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in political science from Harvard University in 1983.

Boyle practiced tax and international tax law with Bingham, Dana & Gould.

Boyle serves as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the Provisional Government of the Palestinian Authority.

He also represents two associations of citizens within Bosnia and was involved in developing the indictment against Slobodan Milošević for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Over his career, he has represented national and international bodies including the Blackfoot Nation (Canada), the Nation of Hawaii, and the Lakota Nation, as well as numerous individual death penalty and human rights cases.

He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare.

As member of the board of Amnesty International USA at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, he claimed that Amnesty International USA acted in ways closely related to United States foreign policy interests.

He stated that Amnesty, along with other human rights organisations in the US, failed to sufficiently criticise the Sabra and Shatila Massacre in Lebanon.

Boyle stated his suspicion that Amnesty International, which is headquartered in London, was also subject to this bias.

He attributes alleged links between Amnesty International and Western foreign policy interests to the relatively large financial contribution of Amnesty International USA to AI's international budget, which he estimated at 20%.

Boyle added that Amnesty International was instrumental in publicizing the "Iraqi soldiers dumping children from incubators in Kuwait" hoax.

He claimed aspects of organizational continuity and survival came ahead of human rights aims in Amnesty International.

He stated "Amnesty International is primarily motivated not by human rights but by publicity. Second comes money. Third comes getting more members. Fourth, internal turf battles. And then finally, human rights, genuine human rights concerns."

During the war for independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Boyle became the first international-law legal adviser to the first Bosnia-Herzegovinian president, Alija Izetbegovic.

Boyle prepared and filed with the International Court of Justice Case 91, also known as the Bosnian genocide case claiming that genocide took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that Serbia was responsible for and complicit in that genocide.

He served as an adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) between 1987–89 and 1991–93.

He drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the US Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

From 1991 to 1992, Boyle served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations.

He served on the board of directors of Amnesty International, as a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee, and on the advisory board for the Council for Responsible Genetics.

In October 1992, Boyle participated in the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nationalities in the United States of America that convened in San Francisco.

Boyle, acting as a "special prosecutor", petitioned the tribunal to issue the following:

In the conclusion of a 37-point legal brief, Boyle wrote that the Federal Government of the United States:

"is hostis humani generis: The enemy of all humankind! For the good of all humanity, this Tribunal must condemn and repudiate the Federal Government of the United States of America and its grotesque vision of a New World Order that is constructed upon warfare, bloodshed, violence, criminality, genocide, racism, colonialism, apartheid, massive violations of fundamental human rights, and the denial of the international legal right of self-determination to the Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America and elsewhere around the world."

Boyle, who has been advising Hawaiian independence groups since 1992, has argued that "The legal cause for the restoration of the kingdom is air-tight".

In 1993, Boyle gave a speech in which he called for Hawaiian independence from the United States.

In addition to devising a draft constitution for one group, the Nation of Hawaii, Boyle filed suit in the United States Supreme Court in 1998 to demand the restoration of Hawaiian independence and reparations "for all the harm inflicted on the Kingdom of Hawaii".

The court later determined that the kingdom "was a non-recognised sovereign that does not have access to the US courts".

In December 2004, Boyle stated that the United States is illegally occupying the state of Hawaii and he has encouraged Native Hawaiians to press for independence and, if necessary, unilaterally proclaim their own state.

In a three-hour speech entitled "The Restoration of Hawaii's Independence," Boyle claimed that the United States has conceded it unlawfully occupied the Kingdom of Hawaii and that fact alone "gives the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) the entitlement to restore their independent status as a sovereign nation state."

Boyle argued that, like the Palestinians, Hawaiians should "exercise their right of self-determination", instead of asking the permission for it.

Boyle stated that "the plight of the Hawaiian people is generally well known in the world and there's a great deal of sympathy."

He concluded his speech by stating that "Hawaii should send the strongest message to Washington it can. Letters carry no weight. The number of people in the street do. Gandhi threw the mighty British out of India with peaceful, nonviolent force. People power, submit to it."

The final verdict of the case in 2007 stated that while Serbia had not committed genocide, genocide indeed had taken place in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that Serbia was responsible for "failing to prevent and punish the genocide which it knew was taking place."

Based on circumstantial evidence, Boyle has claimed that SARS-CoV-2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon that escaped from a high-level lab in Wuhan, China.

Boyle has no academic degree in virology or biology but has criticised research on pathogens.

The lab-leak theory was found to be unlikely by the World Health Organization and researchers have found no evidence that the virus was created by genetic manipulation.