This lecture will cover the multi-decade effort to draft and promote a new treaty, including significant milestones, including the adoption of the International Law Commission’s (ILC) 2019 Draft Articles, and the protracted and ultimately successful advocacy within the UN General Assembly’s Sixth (Legal) Committee to achieve a consensus resolution in 2022 that allowed the process to move forward. The 2024 adoption of GA Resolution 79/122, which authorises convening a United Nations Diplomatic Conference for crafting a comprehensive legal instrument was a critical achievement, setting the stage for negotiations over the next several years.

The Lecture will reflect upon the enduring struggle for justice and the imperative to adopt, ratify, and enforce a new treaty, drawing historical parallels with the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. It will underscore the need for continued dedication to ending impunity for crimes against humanity globally.

Speaker

Professor Leila Nadya Sadat is the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at Washington University and visited at Yale Law School from 2021-2024. She served as Special Adviser on Crimes Against Humanity to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor from 2013-2023 and is on the registered list of experts for the Moscow Mechanism of the OSCE. A prolific scholar, she was the first woman to receive the Alexis de Tocqueville Distinguished Fulbright Chair (2011) and has received multiple awards for her work including, most recently, the Goler T. Butcher Medal from the American Society of International Law.

In 2008, Sadat launched the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative to write the world’s first global treaty on crimes against humanity and continues to spearhead its negotiation and adoption. Closer to home, she has been working on gun violence as a human rights crisis, recently publishing Torture in our Schools? with the Harvard Law Review, addressing mass school shootings in America. She is Chair of the International Law Association (American Branch), a member of the American Law Institute and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, has held leadership positions in many other learned societies, and is a member of the board of editors of the Journal of International Criminal Justice. She recently joined the Advisory Council of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, and the board of EyeWitness to Atrocities. Prior to entering academia, she practiced international commercial law and arbitration in Paris, France, and clerked on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the French Cour de Cassation and Conseil d’Etat. Sadat holds law degrees from Columbia, Tulane, and the University of Paris I – Sorbonne.  

Chair

Dr Maria Varaki is a lecturer in international law at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Before moving to London she held research positions with the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Helsinki and the Law Faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was also an Assistant Professor in International Law at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. Currently she is a Research Associate in 3 Generations of Digital Human Rights, ERC project, 2023-2028, Hebrew University, Faculty of Law.