Payam Akhavan

Who is Payam Akhavan?

Payam Akhavan is a lawyer and a McGill University professor in Montreal.

Akhavan was born in Tehran, Iran and moved in his childhood to Toronto, Canada to flee 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 and in 2013 he was interviewed by BBC's flagship program HardTalk