Eduardo Valencia Ospina

Eduardo Valencia Ospina (born 19 November 1940) is a Colombian lawyer, politician, and current member of the International Law Commission (ILC).[1] Born into Aristocracy in cali, by the late 1950s Eduardo was accepted at the Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogota. Some years later he gets a Harvard scholarship. Valencia Ospina joined the United Nations in 1964 and worked for 36 years on its legal and judicial activities, before retiring in 2000 with the rank of Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary-General.[2][3] Most notably, he was Senior Legal Officer in the Office of Legal Affairs of the Secretariat of the organisation and was the registrar (Secretary General) of the International Court of Justice, known as the ICJ, from 1987 to 2000, making him the only South American to ever manage the most important court in the world.[4][5][6] Valenica Ospina is also the second longest serving registrar of the ICJ.[7] In November 2016 Valencia Ospina was elected to serve for a third term as a member of the International Law Commission.[8] At the ILC, Valencia Ospina served as First Vice-Chair during its 69th session in 2017,[9] and as Chair during its 70th session in 2018.[10] In 2007, he was also appointed special rapporteur for the report on the "Protection of persons in the event of disasters".[11] The Commission adopted the resulting "Draft articles on the protection of persons in the event of disasters" in 2016.[12] The draft articles were subsequently submitted to the United Nations General Assembly and put on its agenda.[13]

Eduardo Valencia Ospina is also an international arbitrator and an external counsel in cases before the ICJ. He is in particular a lawyer for Colombia in the maritime border dispute case with Nicaragua.[14]

Alongside his activities at the UN, Valencia Ospina also gave guest lectures at several universities, including Trinity College Dublin, and taught at the Hague Academy of International Law.[15]

Valencia Ospina is the former president of the Latin American Society of International Law.[16][17] He also served on the board of several international law journals, including the Journal of International Dispute Settlement. Most notably, he was the editor in chief of the journal The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals.[18]

Valencia Ospina holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School (1963) where he was also a "Special Graduate Student" in 1964,[19] a PhD in Juridical Sciences and a PhD in Economic Sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia.[20]