Hilmi M. Zawati

Who is Hilmi M. Zawati?

Hilmi M. Zawati, D.C.L., Ph.D., is currently president of the International Legal Advocacy Forum, and an international criminal law jurist and human rights advocate. Before Joining ILAF in 2006, Zawati has taught numerous subjects at both Kuwait University and Bishop’s University, and been a prominent speaker and author on a number of hotly debated legal issues. During the past decade, he co-chaired and participated in several international conferences and addressed major academic and professional gatherings in a number of Middle Eastern countries, Africa, Europe, and at home in Canada. He has an accomplished body of trans-disciplinary scholarship. Zawati’s present primary research and teaching areas are: public international law; international criminal law; international humanitarian and human rights law; international gender justice system; international environmental law of armed conflict; and Islamic law of nations (siyar). Zawati has been a committed human rights activist over the last three decades and has actively advocated human rights of wartime rape victims throughout the world ever since the first reports of war crimes during the Yugoslav dissolution war of 1992 to 1995. He is the author of several prize-winning books on international humanitarian and human rights law, including his most recent book The Triumph of Ethnic Hatred and the Failure of International Political Will: Gendered Violence and Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.