Daniel Mekonnen

Dr. Daniel Mekonnen is the Director of the Eritrean Law Society (ELS). Among other things, he was Judge of the Central Provincial Court in Eritrea, and has also served 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. From July to December 2018, he is based in Leiden as a Joint Visiting Fellow of the African Studies Centre (ASC) and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). In this context, he is undertaking a new research project titled “China’s First-Ever Military Base Abroad: Implications for Regional Peace and Security in the Turbulent Horn of Africa.” Daniel 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 the first Eritrean recipient of a post-doctoral fellowship from Germany’s leading funder of research in higher education, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and is also Member of the Council of the International Criminal Bar (ICB).