Juan Mendez

Mr. Juan E. Méndez is currently the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Special Adviser on Crime Prevention at the ICC, Office of the Prosecutor. He is a Visiting Professor of Law at American University – Washington School of Law and President Emeritus of the International Center for Transitional Justice. Mr. Méndez was formerly a Resident Scholar at The Ford Foundation and served as the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide from 2004-2007. His representation of political prisoners in Argentina in the 1970s resulted in his arrest, torture, and administrative detention by the country's military dictatorship. After his release, he moved to the United States and worked with Human Rights Watch for 15 years. Mr. Méndez served as Executive Director of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica and Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame. From 2000-2003, he was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States and served as President of the Commission in 2002. He is on the Board of Advisors of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect and on the Advisory Council of the Center for Human Rights at the American Bar Association. He has taught at Georgetown Law School and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and teaches regularly at the Oxford Masters Program in International Human Rights Law. He has received numerous honors, including the inaugural Monsignor Oscar A. Romero Award for Leadership in Service to Human Rights of the University of Dayton and the Jeanne & Joseph Sullivan Award of the Heartland Alliance. He is a member of the bar of Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the District of Columbia, U.S. He earned a J.D. from Stella Maris University in Argentina, and a certificate from American University's Washington College of Law, in Washington D.C.