Dr. Mohammed Ayat is one of the Special Advisors to the Prosecutor, specifically on regional cooperation with Middle East and North Africa (MENA), since March 2013. He is also a professor of law at Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco; Head of the Network for Research in International Criminal Justice; Member of the National Human Rights Council; and Attorney before the Moroccan Supreme Court. He served at ICTR for about 15 years, notably as Senior Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor. He was an elected member of the UN Human Rights Committee and a member of an International Fact Finding Mission on the independence of the Syrian Bar and Judiciary (March 2011). Academically he is, i.a., a Fulbright alumnus and a former senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute. He is well published in Arabic and French, occasionally in English, has contributed to the drafting of the UN Model Codes of Transitional Criminal Justice and, as a North-African expert, to a worldwide Post-Conflict Justice project at the International Institute of Higher Studies of Criminal Sciences (Italy). He also participates in an IBA program to train Arab and African Lawyers on international criminal law (e.g. in the UK, the UAE, Tunisia, Bahrain, Morocco, Uganda and Rwanda).
Trying individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression