Payam Akhavan was born in Tehran, Iran; Bachelor of Law (LL.B.) Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto; Master of Law (LL.M.) and Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.), Harvard Law School. Currently Senior Attorney at the international law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton in New York; previously Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at the Hague; also served as Special Advisor on international criminal law matters in Cambodia, Guatemala, and East Timor. He has served as Human Rights Officer, United Nations Human Rights Commission in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia during the war; appointed by the European Community Presidency to Missions of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Senior Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at Leiden University, Faculty of Law in the Netherlands, and at Yale Law School in the United States; Research Fellow at the Danish Centre for Human Rights in Copenhagen and at the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights in Oslo.

Recent publications include: Beyond Impunity: Can International Criminal Justice Prevent Future Atrocities? in Volume 95, American Journal of International Law, January (2001), Reducing Genocide to Law: Definition, Meaning, and the Ultimate Crime (2003).