Ambassador Stephen J. Rapp

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Stephen Rapp is a former United States Ambassador-at-Large heading the Office of Global Criminal Justice during 2009-2015, where he coordinated U.S. Government support for international, hybrid, and national courts and tribunals prosecuting atrocity crimes. From 2007-2009, Ambassador Rapp served as prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he led the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. From 2001-2007, he served as senior trial attorney and chief of prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he headed the team that achieved the convictions of media leaders for incitement to genocide. He was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa in 1993-2001.

He is currently a Senior Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Prevention of Genocide, and at Oxford University’s Center for Law, Ethics and Armed Conflict. He serves as Chair of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a Senior Peace Fellow of the Public International Law and Policy Group, and on the boards of Physicians for Human Rights, the IBA Human Rights Institute, the ABA Rule of Law Initiative, and the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights