Judge Patrick Robinson, past-president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, will serve a three-year role as a Distinguished International Fellow at Stetson University College of Law beginning in the fall. He will meet this July with Stetson Law students studying at The Hague in the Netherlands. Judge Robinson has also served on the faculty of Stetson’s Cayman Islands Winter Break Program.

The ICTY is a United Nations court of law created in 1993 to deal with war crimes that took place during the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s. The court has made precedent-setting decisions on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Judge Robinson was Jamaica’s representative to the UN for 26 years, before being elected as a judge of the ICTY by the UN General Assembly in 1998. He served as president of that court from 2008-2011. He chaired the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and has served as a member of numerous international bodies, including the International Law Commission, the Haiti Truth and Justice Commission, and others.

Former Distinguished International Fellows at Stetson Law include Senator A.J. Nicholson, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade for Jamaica, and the Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Stetson Law’s history includes a legacy of leaders in international human rights advocacy. Former Stetson Law Dean Harold L. “Tom” Sebring, who led the law school from 1955-1968, served as a judge for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after World War II.

Stetson Law is home to the Center for Excellence in International Law. Professors Dorothea Beane and Darryl C. Wilson co-direct Stetson’s Institute for Caribbean Law and Policy. In 2008, the co-directors joined a faculty consortium to help draft the U.S. Virgin Islands constitution. Stetson is also a member of the American and Caribbean Law Initiative.