Juan Pablo is a Colombian attorney with an International Human Rights LL.M. from Northwestern University School of Law. He has worked at the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 2017 and is currently on leave to start his PhD in the Department of International Relations at LSE.
Formerly, he was a Clinical Advocacy Fellow of the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, and held the Eleanor Roosevelt Visiting Fellowship at the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. He worked at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia/United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials, EarthRights International and as probono counsel for the Colombian Campaign Against Landmines, which is part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
His research looks into the reasons why some industrialists, financiers, executives and other corporate bureaucrats, particularly from the Global North, have participated, with impunity, in the commission of mass violence and environmental destruction, predominantly in the Global South. After World War II, international criminal trials opened a window for individual criminal liability under international law, encompassing officers who remotely participated in the commission of horrendous crimes, comfortably sitting at their desks (“Schreibtischtäter” or “desk perpetrators”). This included not only the cases against the industrialists (i.e., IG Farben, The Flick, Krupp, and Zyklon B), but also others against state bureaucrats, such as the case of Adolf Eichmann, who, according to Arendt, was the desk murderer par excellence.
However, subsequent to this precedent, most of the desk perpetrators who have stood trials under international law fit the profile of government bureaucrats. Top corporate actors have rarely been the centre of international justice, and their corporations have hardly been accountable to repair victims. This begs the question of whether, and if so, how international (criminal) law is capable of holding corporate power accountable.
The views expressed by Juan Pablo are his own and do not reflect the views of the ICC.
Research topic
Corporate accountability
Teaching experience
- Clinical Advocacy Fellow at Harvard Law School, Internatioal Human Rights Clinic, Cambridge, MA, USA (2016-2017)
- Teacher Assistant at Universidad del Rosario School of Law, Bogotá, Colombia (2012-2013).
Academic supervisor
Professor Jens Meierhenrich
Research Cluster affliation
International Institutions, Law and Ethics Research Cluster
Expertise details
In his experience in litigation and adjudication of international crimes, Juan has conducted research and worked in hundreds of submissions before national and international jurisdictions. His experience not only includes his work for the Judges of the ICC and ECCC, but also submissions before the universal UN treaty bodies, both the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, arbitration and cases in the US under the Alien Tort Claims Act. He further conducted academic, fact-finding and judicial work in Colombia, Mali, Peru and the United States.
At Harvard Law School, Juan Pablo taught at the International Human Rights Clinic as a Clinical Advocacy Fellow, and further conducted research on corporate accountability as the Eleanor Roosevelt Visiting Fellow of the Human Rights Program.