Daniel Mekonnen

Dr. Daniel Mekonnen is the Director of the Eritrean Law Society (ELS). Formerly, he was Judge of the Central Provincial Court in Eritrea, and has served (among other things) as a Senior Legal Advisor and Research Professor at the Oslo-based International Law and Policy Institute (ILPI).

Currently, he is working on a forthcoming monograph titled Africa and the International Criminal Court: Between Cooperation and Antagonism, having completed a 6-month foundational research work on this same topic (from January to June 2018) at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University, as a Senior Core Fellow. He is also Academic Staff Member at the Masters in International Criminal Justice, a joint academic programme of the International Criminal Bar and the University of Tarragona in Spain. He serves as Member of the Council of the International Criminal Bar. He is co-author (with Kjetil Tronvoll) of an internationally acclaimed book, The African Garrison State: Human Rights and Political Development in Eritrea (Boydell & Brewer Publishers, 2014), which made it to the prestigious annual list of “Outstanding Academic Titles” of 2015, bestowed by the CHOICE magazine of the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and the largest library association in the world. He is based in Geneva, Switzerland, on account of the complete closure of space for civil society organisations in Eritrea. Between July and December 2018, he is based in Leiden, The Netherlands, as a Joint Visiting Fellow of the African Studies Centre and the International Institute for Asian Studies.