Valerie Oosterveld

Valerie Oosterveld is a full Professor at Western University’s Faculty Law. Her research and writing focus on gender issues within international criminal justice (and, more recently, outer space law) . She has published widely on the concept of gender in international criminal law, the interpretation of sexual and gender-based crimes by international criminal tribunals, and gender-sensitive investigation and prosecution. Her forthcoming co-edited volume (with Indira Rosenthal and Susana SáCouto), Gender and International Criminal Law, will be published by Oxford University Press in June 2022.

Valerie is the Associate Director of Western University’s Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction and she served as an Associate Dean at Western Law from 2014-2018. She is an active member of the Governance Committee of the Canadian Partnership for International Justice, a SSHRC-funded partnership conducting research on domestic and international accountability for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In 2010, she served on the Canadian delegation to the Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Kampala, Uganda.

Valerie is an emeritus member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, in which she served from 2014-2021. She was awarded Western University’s Faculty Scholar designation from 2017-2019.

Before joining the Faculty of Law in 2005, Valerie served in the Legal Affairs Bureau of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. In this role, she provided legal advice on international criminal accountability for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, especially with respect to the ICC, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. She served on the Canadian delegation to various ICC-related negotiations, including the Assembly of States Parties.

Prior to joining the Legal Affairs Bureau, Valerie was a member of the Canadian delegation to the 1998 UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an ICC. In this role, she negotiated various gender provisions, as Canada played a leading role in pressing for a gender-sensitive Rome Statute.

She earned her JSD and LL.M. from Columbia Law School, her LL.B. from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and her B.Soc.Sc. from the University of Ottawa.