Payam Akhavan

Payam Akhavan (Persian: پیام اخوان) is an international lawyer and a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague.

Akhavan was born in Tehran, Iran and moved in his childhood to Toronto, Canada because of persecution of the Baha’i religious minority before the 1979 Islamic revolution. He has since played a leading role as a pioneer of international criminal law and global justice, is regarded as a leading scholar and practitioner of international law and human rights, and an important figure in the Iranian human rights movement. In 2005, he was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, in 2013 he was interviewed by BBC's flagship program HardTalk, and in 2014 he delivered the Vancouver Human Rights Lecture, which was broadcast on CBC Ideas. In May 2015, he appeared on Globo Television’s Milenio program in Brazil.

He is currently an Associate Professor of International Law and former Boulton Senior Fellow at McGill University Faculty of Law in Montreal, Canada (2005–). He is also Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College at Oxford University. He served as the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at The Hague (1994–2000) and made significant contributions to its foundational jurisprudence. He has also served with the UN in Bosnia, Croatia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Timor Leste.

His academic appointments include: Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2013); Visiting Professor at Sciences Po in Paris, France (2012); Senior Fellow at Yale Law School (2002–05); Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Toronto (2002); Visiting Professor at Leiden University in The Netherlands; Research Fellow at the Danish Institute of Human Rights in Copenhagen, Denmark (1991–92), and at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo, Faculty of Law (1990–91).

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