Mr. Hans Corell served as Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and the Legal Counsel of the United Nations from March 1994 to March 2004. In this capacity, he was head of the Office of Legal Affairs in the United Nations Secretariat. Before joining the United Nations, he was Ambassador and Under-Secretary for Legal and Consular Affairs in the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1984 to 1994.
He received his Law Degree from the University of Uppsala in 1962. From 1962 to 1972, he served first as a law clerk and then as a judge in the courts of first and second instance. He was appointed Judge of Appeal in 1980. In 1972, he joined the Ministry of Justice where he was engaged in legislative work concerning real estates, property formation, joint stock companies and incorporated associations, data protection, secrecy, general administrative law, the relation between the Realm and the Church of Sweden, and constitutional law. In 1979, he became Director of the Ministry’s Division for Administrative and Constitutional Law. Two years later, he was appointed Chief Legal Officer of the Ministry. Corell has been a member of Sweden’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly 1985-1993 and has had several assignments related to the Council of Europe, OECD and the CSCE (now OSCE).
Together with two other rapporteurs, he was author of the CSCE proposal for the establishment of the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, transmitted to the United Nations in February 1993. He was the Secretary-General’s representative at the 1998 UN Conference that adopted the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. During his service in the United Nations he was also involved in the establishment of the International Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Extraordinary Chambers of the national courts of Cambodia for trial of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Since his retirement from public service in 2004, Corell is engaged in many different activities in the legal field, inter alia as legal adviser, lecturer, and member of different boards. Among other, he is involved in the work of the International Bar Association, the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University and the Hague Institute for the Internalisation of Law. Since 2006 he is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University. Corell is the author of many publications. He holds honorary Doctor of Laws degrees at Stockholm University (1997) and Lund University (2007).
For more information, visit: www.havc.se.