MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA – United Nations lawyer Jon MacDonald will deliver the Archibald McDougall Lecture in International Law on April 5 at 12 p.m. in the Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom at WVU Law.
A prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), MacDonald will discuss sexual violence in international conflicts.
Admission is free and the public is invited to attend.
“When these crimes were first prosecuted in tribunals after World War Two, people viewed sexual violence as an inevitable and foreseeable side consequence of armed conflict,” MacDonald said. “Now, the International Criminal Court has a much better, more true position that embodies the thought that rape is a weapon of war. Sexual violence, along with a whole spectrum of crimes like murder and destruction, is used after land is won to drive the population out and make sure they don’t come back.”
MacDonald is the 2017 Archibald McDougall Visiting Professor in International Law at WVU.
He is currently teaching a course the prosecution involved in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Before he joined the ICTY in 2012, MacDonald was a domestic prosecutor in Scotland.
About Archibald McDougall
Archibald McDougall was born in 1903 in Tasmania, Australia, and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar from 1924–1927. Over the course of an illustrious legal career, McDougall served as a delegate to the League of Nations, legal counselor to the British Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and was a Professor of International Law at the Iraq Law School in Baghdad. McDougall died in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1984 and bequeathed a portion of his estate to WVU College of Law.
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