Kriangsak Kittichaisaree (PhD Law, 1983) has been elected to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in a session at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in June 2017.

Professor Kriangsak Kittichaisaree joins twenty other judges on the Tribunal set up by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is the ‘Constitution for the Oceans’, to settle disputes relating to the rights and obligations of States and other actors under the Convention. The seat of the Tribunal is Hamburg, Germany, where he will serve an initial term of nine years commencing on 1 October 2017. He is the first person from Southeast Asia and Oceania to serve as a judge of the Tribunal.

After a PhD at St Edmund’s in 1986 he has been actively involved in virtually all areas of international law. He was a member of the UN International Law Commission (2012-2016) and is the author of the pioneering textbook ‘International Criminal Law (OUP 2001)’.

Currently Professor Kittichaisaree is Ambassador of the Kingdom of Thailand to the Russian Federation and, concurrently, Armenia, Belarus, Moldova, and Uzbekistan. He has held visiting professorships at world-renowned institutions in Australia, Singapore, and the USA and has recently published a book explaining how cyber activities are regulated under international law. He is being commissioned by OUP to write another book, entitled ‘The Obligation to Extradite or Prosecute’, to be published by the end of this year or early next year.