John Cerone

Professor Cerone holds faculty appointments at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, American University Washington College of Law, and the University of London. Prior faculty appointments have included the Paul Martin Senior Professorship in International Affairs & Law at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, and Visiting Chair in Public International Law at Lund University Faculty of Law. He has been awarded fellowships at the Nobel Institute (Oslo), the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute (Lund) where he served as the Distinguished Chair in Human Rights & Humanitarian Law. He has been a visiting scholar at the International Criminal Court, and a Fulbright scholar at both the Danish Institute for Human Rights and the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. As a practicing international lawyer, he has worked for a number of IGOs and NGOs, including the UN, the OSCE, the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the International Crisis Group, and has served as a legal adviser to various international criminal tribunals. He also has extensive field experience in conflict and post-conflict environments, including in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and East Timor. He is an elected member of the International Institute of Humanitarian Law (IIHL) and has served on a number of expert groups for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He served as Special Adviser to the first U.S. delegation to the UN Human Rights Council. He received the President’s Award of the Boston Bar Association for his legal work on Guantanamo Bay issues, which includes representing human rights organizations in detainee litigation before U.S. courts and international human rights institutions. He has lectured at the IIHL (Sanremo), NATO Headquarters, the Institut International des Droits de l'Homme, the Inter-American Defense College, the Canadian Forces Staff College, the Swedish Defense University, the Academy on Human Rights & Humanitarian Law (AU WCL), and in the ICRC Annual Course, and has been keynote speaker at the U.S. Naval War College and at the 2016 UNDP Transitional Justice Conference in Kathmandu. He has taught in over 40 countries across all regions of the globe and is the author of dozens of articles and book chapters on international law, as well as the casebook "Public International Law: Cases, Problems, and Texts," (with Stephen McCaffrey and Dinah Shelton).