The UK government recently announced it was nominating the candidature of Nigerian born Professor of Public International Law at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, Dapo Akande as its candidate for the International Law Commission of the United Nations based in Geneva.
His term at the United Nation’s law commission will run for a period of 4 years and is expected to commence in 2023.
He is also a Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford and co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
Professor Akande attended the University of Ife, Nigeria where he bagged his Bachelor of Laws Degree (LLB) in 1992. He qualified as barrister and solicitor from the Nigerian Law School in 1993 and thereafter proceeded for his Masters of Laws Degree (LLM) at the London School of Economics And Political Science between 1993 and 1994.
He was Professor of Public International Law at Oxford Law Faculty and was between 2012 and 2017 the co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Human Rights for Future Generations. He has held visiting professorships at Yale Law School, the University of Miami School of Law and the Catolica Global Law School, Lisbon.
He was the 2015 Sir Ninian Stephen Visiting Scholar at the University of Melbourne Law School’s Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. Before taking up his position in Oxford in 2004, he held positions at the University of Nottingham and the University of Durham, and from 1994 to 1998, he taught part-time at the London School of Economics and at Christ’s and Wolfson Colleges, Cambridge.
Professor Akande was also nominated by four other countries namely, Japan, Kenya, Slovenia and Nigeria and stands as the first candidate to be so nominated by four countries from the United Nations regional groups in the history of the International Law Commission.
