Andrew Clapham
Andrew Clapham (born in Tunbridge Wells) is a British international lawyer specializing in human rights, international courts and tribunals and international humanitarian law. He has served in various advisory capacities at the United Nations. Background. Clapham is currently professor of public international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva, Switzerland. After undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, he wrote his Ph.D. at the European University Institute in Florence under the guidance of Antonio Cassese. He is an associate member of the Matrix Chambers. Work. Clapham has worked as Special Adviser on Corporate  Responsibility to High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, and Adviser on International Humanitarian Law to Sergio Vieira de Mello, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Iraq. He has also been the representative of human rights group Amnesty International to the United Nations between 1991 and 1994. Clapham was among survivors of the Canal Hotel Bombing in Iraq during which de Mello was killed with 20 other members of his staff on 19 August 2003. In 2015, Clapham was among two international lawyers whose legal opinion Amnesty International commissioned to reach the conclusion that the United Kingdom was  breaching the law by allowing the sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia despite knowing about their use to bomb civilians. In 2017, he was appointed to serve as a member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, charged with monitoring and assessing the human rights situation in the country. Clapham is often cited in the news media for his expertise in relation to the United Nations' efforts to hold perpetrators of war crimes accountable and uphold human rights law. He was the first director of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights between 2008  and 2014. Publications. Representative publications include: