Kenneth Watkin

Guest Author

Brigadier-General (Ret’d) Ken Watkin, OMM, CD, QC served 33 years in the Canadian Forces, four years as the Judge Advocate General, the senior military legal advisor and superintendent of the military justice system. Since his retirement in 2010, Ken served as a Foreign Observer to the Israeli Independent Commission investigating the 31 May 2010 Gaza Blockade incident, and from May 2011 until June 2012 as the Charles H. Stockton Professor of International Law at the United States Naval War College. He continues to work as a national security and counterterrorism consultant.

He is the author of Fighting at the Legal Boundaries: Controlling the Use of Force in Contemporary Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2016) and a co-author of The Law in War: A Concise Overview(Routledge, 2018).

Ken is a graduate of The Royal Military College (BA Hons 1976) and Queen’s University (LLB, 1980 and LLM, 1990) in Kingston, Ontario Canada. From 2002 to 2003 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School. In 2010 he received the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) President’s Award that recognizes the significant contribution of a Canadian jurist to the legal profession, to the CBA or to the public life of Canada.