Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Military Studies. He currently serves as Special Advisor to the ICC Prosecutor for International Criminal Law Discourse and is an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London.
Kevin holds a PhD in Law from Leiden University and a JD with distinction from Stanford Law School. His books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press 2011) and The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (Oxford University Press 2013) (edited with Gerry Simpson). He co-edited the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press 2018) and Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Kevin has been involved in the International Criminal Court’s negotiations over the crime of aggression, worked as Human Rights Watch’s external legal advisor on the trial of Saddam Hussein, served for three years as one of Radovan Karadzic’s formally-appointed legal associates at the ICTY, and was the plaintiffs’ expert witness concerning medical experimentation in Salim v Mitchell, a successful Alien Tort Statute case against the psychologists who designed and administered the CIA’s torture program. He consults regularly with a variety of UN organisations (such as UNAMA) and human rights groups (such as Human Rights First) and is an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London.