Legal Action Committee
Paul Clark
Paul is a barrister, practising from Garden Court Chambers, London, who specialises in public, civil, and international law, with a focus upon human rights. His domestic practice includes judicial review, private law, inquests and inquiries, across a range of areas including prisons, criminal justice, trafficking, and mental health. His international work includes representing defendants and states in pre-trial, trial and appeal proceedings before the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Dr Tomaso Ferrando
Dr Ferrando is Research Professor at the University of Antwerp (Faculty of Law and Institute of Development Policy). He obtained his PhD in Law from Sciences Po Law School in 2015 and has been an Italian barrister since 2011. Before moving to Antwerp in 2020, he lectured in Law at the University of Bristol Law School and at the University of Warwick Faculty of Law. Throughout the years, he has been legal advisor of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2016-2020), Resident Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (Harvard Law School), the Universidade de São Paulo (Commerce Law Department) and the University of Cape Town (Public Law Department). His research mainly focuses on global food chains and the interaction between law, the transnational expansion of the Western model of production and consumption, and forms of resistance.
As a consultant and pro-bono advocate, Dr Ferrando is involved in researching and organising against large-scale land acquisitions, analyses the impact of EU policies on the right to food and exposed the connections between financial capital, land acquisitions and the global food regime.
Dr Geoff Gordon
Geoff is trained in two legal systems and a member of the New York State Bar, with a JD from Columbia University and PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Geoff’s expertise includes issues of law and technology, including novel legal applications and governance consequences of digital technologies. He is also expert in international adjudication, and works closely with institutions in The Hague. In his academic life, he researches the interaction of time technologies and international law. In a former life, he clerked in the US Federal District Courts and was involved in large-scale litigation in fields of anti-trust and securities regulation.
Dr Kate Grady
Kate is a Senior Lecturer in Law at SOAS University of London, where she researches in international law.
Professor Gleider I Hernández
Gleider Hernández is Professor of Public International Law at the Catholic University of Leuven and the Open University of the Netherlands. Previously, he was Reader in Public International Law at Durham Law School and Deputy Director of the Durham Global Policy Institute. Gleider, originally Canadian, took a D.Phil from Wadham College, Oxford, and read for LL.M degrees at Leiden University and BCL and LL.B degrees at McGill University. He is the author of The International Court of Justice and the Judicial Function (OUP, 2014) and International Law (OUP, 2019). Gleider
In addition to his academic work, Gleider served as legal officer (law clerk) for two judges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and was called to the Barreau du Québec and practised as a barrister at Fasken Martineau LLP. In addition to his LAC work, he occasionally consults for States, NGOs and arbitral investment tribunals.
Russell Hopkins
Russell is a barrister in London. He specialises in business and human rights cases using both civil and criminal law. Russell qualified as a solicitor in 2008, and exercised advocacy rights as a solicitor-advocate in the disputes practice of a leading commercial law firm. In 2010-2011, he was selected to work as a judicial assistant to Lord Collins and Lord Wilson in the UK Supreme Court. Russell has experience before various international tribunals, most recently as the expert legal adviser to the Cambodian trial judges of the Khmer Rouge tribunals in Phnom Penh. Russell has published numerous blog posts, articles and a book chapter on aspects of international corporate liability for human rights violations. Russell is currently involved with academic research projects at the Universities of Oxford and Amsterdam.
Dr Ioannis Kalpouzos
Dr Ioannis Kalpouzos is a scholar and practitioner in public international law, international criminal law, the law of war and human rights law. He is a faculty member at City Law School, University of London; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Law, and, in the Spring of 2020 was a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, teaching on New Technologies and the Law of War. He has also taught at King’s College, University of London and at the University of Notre Dame.
Dr Kalpouzos is co-founder of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN). He has worked on the themes of war & occupation, environmental justice, supply chains & accountability, as well as migration & border violence. He has worked on projects on the exploitation of natural resources in Western Sahara; a collaboration with Bellingcat on air-strike analysis and evidence in Yemen; climate change and international law; and international criminal law and the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia, co-authoring a submission to the International Criminal Court. He has worked with legal clinics at Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and King’s College London, among many institutions.
Dr Kalpouzos’ is working on evidence in the law of targeting and on the history of the legal concept of war involving non-state armed groups. His research has also focused on new weapons technologies, on which he has been a recipient of a Harvard Law School Institute of Global Law and Policy collaborative grant, as well as the history and theory of international criminal law, especially in relation to ‘banal’ or ‘structural’ criminality. Recent publications include ‘Double Elevation: International Law, Autonomous Weapons and the Search for an Irreducible International Law’ in the Leiden Journal of International Law and ‘International Criminal Law and the Violence against Migrants, in the German Law Review.
Aonghus Kelly
Aonghus was educated at University College Cork, Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway. Aonghus is the Executive Director of Irish Rule of Law International (IRLI) and previously worked for the European Union in North Africa on Criminal Justice issues and prior to that in the Defence at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). He has also worked for several years in both Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina on the investigation and prosecution of war crimes, organised crime, corruption and terrorism matters. Aonghus lectured at the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina and has given guest lectures at universities in the United States, Ireland, Canada, Russia, Cambodia and Kosovo. Aonghus practiced with Public Interest Lawyers in the United Kingdom and Blake & Kenny Solicitors in Ireland and is qualified to practice law in New Zealand, Ireland, England and Wales, Cambodia and in Northern Ireland.
Professor Yvonne McDermott Rees
Yvonne McDermott Rees is Professor of Law at Swansea University, United Kingdom. She is the author of Fairness in International Criminal Trials (Oxford University Press, 2016), Proving International Crimes (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2021) and over 60 journal articles and book chapters on issues related to human rights, international criminal law, and the law of evidence. She is Principal Investigator on a project entitled, ‘The Future of Human Rights Investigations: Using Open Source Intelligence to Transform the Discovery and Documentation of Mass Human Rights Violations’ (www.osr4rights.org), funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. She is an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.
Eva Pils
Eva Pils is Professor of Law at King's College London and an affiliated scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School. She studied law, philosophy and sinology in Heidelberg, London and Beijing and holds a PhD in law from University College London. Her current research addresses autocratic conceptions and practices of governance and dimensions of legal and political resistance at domestic and global levels, and she is working on a book on the rule of law and its opponents in the People’s Republic of China (forthcoming with Hart). Her most recent book, Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism, was published in 2018. At King's, she teaches courses on human rights; law and society in China; and authoritarianism, populism and the law. Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She has held visiting appointments at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at Columbia University (New York) and is a legal action committee member of the Global Legal Action Network.
Joe Tan
Joe is the Pro Bono Legal Services Manager at Advocates for International Development and manages the provision of pro bono legal advice, assistance and training to humanitarian, development and human rights NGOs working primarily in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Joe’s practice in strategic public interest and human rights litigation focused on civil liberties, equality and refugee law and spans multiple jurisdictions including the European Court of Human Rights, Court of Justice of the European Union, Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Committee Against Torture and various national constitutional courts (Uganda, Nigeria, Jamaica, Singapore, Kenya, Malawi and Australia). He has worked as a Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, the Pre-Trial Judge at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and with the UN Interim Administrative Mission in Kosovo. He is also a consultant with the Chinese Initiative on International Law. An Australian qualified solicitor and barrister, Joe received his LLB (Hons) from the Australian National University and an LLM from the University of Melbourne specialising in international human rights law and international criminal law.
Richard Reynolds
Richard is a barrister at Garden Court Chambers, London, with a national and international human rights practice. He specialises in asylum and immigration law, the law of armed conflict, international criminal law and public international law. Richard has represented clients before the courts of England and Wales at all levels, the European Court of Human Rights, the Human Rights Advisory Panel for Kosovo and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Richard has represented individuals, charities, international organisations and governments. He has appeared in numerous high-profile matters, including securing an arrest warrant for war crimes against a foreign government minister, the prisoners’ right to vote case before the UK Supreme Court, advising on the Paris Agreement on climate change, and advising on redress for colonial-era violations of international law. He is recommended by the Chambers and Partners Guide to the UK Bar, which describes him as “one of the brightest international criminal lawyers around”.
Dr John Reynolds
John Reynolds is Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he chairs Maynooth's LLM in International Justice.
John teaches and writes on questions of international law in relation to colonialism, emergency, race and political economy. His book on Empire, Emergency and International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was awarded the Kevin Boyle Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. His scholarship appears in journals such as the European Journal of International Law, Third World Quarterly, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Journal of Conflict & Security Law, the UCLA Law Review, the American Journal of International Law, and the Palestine Yearbook of International Law. He is a founding editor of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review journal. John's writing also appears in a range of other popular publications including Jacobin, Tribune, Monthly Review, Counterpunch, Jadaliyya, Dublin Review of Books, and the Irish Times.
John works with various social movements and civil society organisations. He was appointed to Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs Civil Society Standing Committee on Human Rights in 2015.
Anita Clifford
Anita Clifford is a barrister, practising at Red Lion Chambers, where she focuses on money laundering, proceeds of crime, fraud and economic sanctions. She is a ranked junior in the 2021 editions of the Legal 500 and Chambers directories for her proceeds of crime work where she is described as a “rising star”. She has an advisory and advocacy practice arising in both the civil and criminal jurisdictions, and is regularly involved in anti-money laundering projects facilitated by the Council of Europe. Anita publishes articles in the area of financial crime and has co-authored a book on the Criminal Finances Act 2017. Her comments on financial crime matters and asset freezing have appeared in the FT, The Times and BBC News. Prior to joining the English Bar, Anita was a solicitor in Australia renowned for its human rights and criminal law work. Much of her practice centred on assisting vulnerable defendants and police misconduct.
Daria Davitti
Daria is Associate Professor in Public International Law at Lund University, Faculty of Law, in Sweden. Her research focuses on the implementation of international law and international human rights law in complex contexts, such as situations of humanitarian and health emergencies, armed conflict, and forced migration. She has written widely on the obligations and responsibility of state and non-state actors operating in such contexts. More generally, she is interested in the interaction between international economic law (in particular international investment law) and human rights and she is currently involved in projects that focus on climate finance and refugee finance. Prior to joining academia she worked as a human rights field officer with the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), as a consultant for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and as a monitor & evaluation and gender officer for various humanitarian NGOs.
Daria is a founding member of The IEL Collective and a member of the steering committee of NeF DeF (New Frontiers in Development Finance) an international project which examines the shifting landscape of international development finance and how it impacts on law, regulation and governance.