Theodor Meron

Theodor Meron, (born 28 April 1930) is an American-Israeli lawyer and judge.

He served as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Mechanism).

In 1945, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine.

He received his legal education at the Hebrew University (M.J.), Harvard Law School (LL.M., J.S.D.) and Cambridge University (Diploma in Public International Law).

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.

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.

He immigrated to the United States in 1978 and is a citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Meron is a scholar of public international law, international humanitarian law, human rights and international criminal law.

Prior to his immigration to the United States, Meron was a legal adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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.

In 2022 he was appointed Special Advisor on International Humanitarian Law to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

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.

In 2000-01 he served as Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State.

He served as President of the ICTY four times (2002-2005 and 2011–15) and inaugural President of the Mechanism for three terms (2012–19).

Meron was born in Kalisz, Poland, to a Jewish family.

Meron was held in a Nazi labor camp during World War II.

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.

In 2006 he was named Charles L. Denison Professor Emeritus and Judicial Fellow at New York University School of 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 American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was awarded a LLD honoris causa by the University of Warsaw in 2011 and LLD honoris causa by the University of Calisia, (Kalisz)in 2021, and in 2017 he was made Officer of the Order of Merit of Poland.

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 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.

It blamed Meron, whom it 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.

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.

He was also named "Grand Officier" of the National Order of Merit by the President of France in 2014.

Fifty years later, in 2017, Meron, citing decades of legal scholarship on the subject, reiterated his legal opinion regarding the illegality of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.

In May 2019, he was elected Honorary Visiting Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and later an Honorary Fellow.

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" (CMG) in 2019.

That same year, he was also one of 17 honorees selected by One Young World and Vanity Fair for the inaugural Global Achievements List, cited for his contributions "for peace, justice and strong institutions" (UK March 2019 issue).