Biography
Dapo Akande is Professor of Public International Law at the Blavatnik School of Government, a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford and Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC). Before moving to the Blavatnik School, he was Professor of Public International Law at Oxford Law Faculty and was, from 2012 to 2017, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Human Rights for Future Generations. He has held visiting professorships at Yale Law School, the University of Miami School of Law and the Catolica Global Law School, Lisbon. He was the 2015 Sir Ninian Stephen Visiting Scholar at the University of Melbourne Law School’s Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law. Before taking up his position in Oxford in 2004, he held positions at the University of Nottingham and the University of Durham, and from 1994 to 1998, he taught part-time at the London School of Economics and at Christ's and Wolfson Colleges, Cambridge.
Dapo has generalist interests in international law. He is one of the authors of Oppenheim's International Law: The United Nations (2017, OUP), which was awarded the 2019 Certificate of Merit by the American Society of International Law. He is one of the editors of the Practitioners Guide to the Application of Human Rights Law in Armed Conflict (2016, OUP), and of Human Rights and 21st Century Challenges: Poverty, Conflict and the Environment (2020, OUP). He was a member of the International Group of Experts that prepared the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (2017, CUP) which was commissioned by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. He was a member of the International Advisory Panel for the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States (2018). His articles have appeared in the leading international law journals.
Dapo is founding editor of EJIL:Talk! the widely read scholarly blog of the European Journal of International Law. He has served on the editorial or advisory boards of several leading international law journals, including the American Journal of International Law and the European Journal of International Law. He has also served in leadership or board positions of scholarly societies and civil society organizations, including as Counsellor on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law; Trustees of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law; on the Advisory Board of the International Centre for Transitional Justice; and as a member of the Africa Group for Justice and Accountability. From 2016 -2018, he was on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Human Rights.
He has acted as consultant, expert, or adviser on international law issues to United Nations bodies, the African Union Commission, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). He has provided advice to States and non-governmental organizations on matters of international law. He has acted as counsel, advocate, adviser or consultant in cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the European Court of Human Rights, international arbitral tribunals in mixed disputes, World Trade Organization and North American Free Trade Area Dispute Settlement panels. He has also acted as consultant/adviser in cases in national courts, including the UK Supreme Court. From 2017-2018 he is acted as legal adviser to the UK Parliament’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Drone’s Inquiry into the ways in which the UK works with partners on the use of drones.