Sam Sasan Shoamanesh

Vice-President of The Institute for 21st Century Questions
Managing Editor of Global Brief Magazine

Sam Sasan Shoamanesh is the Vice-President of the Institute for 21st Century Questions and Managing Editor of Global Brief magazine. He has served the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 2005 in various capacities, including formerly as Chef de Cabinet to the Prosecutor of the ICC, HE Dr Fatou Bensouda (2012-2021). He has also worked for a number of other international judicial bodies, including the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice. He has two decades of experience in legal, policy and strategic analysis and advice, administrative management, diplomacy and fostering partnerships – with participation in more than 30 UN Security Council briefings; UNGA sessions, and other high-level diplomatic engagements and fora. In 2011, he initiated and co-organized the first regional diplomatic conference on the ICC in the Middle East, hosted in Doha, in cooperation with the League of Arab States and the government of Qatar.

Shoamanesh has held several international consultancies, lectured around the world, and published widely, with a particular focus on the Middle East/West Asia. In addition to book chapters, his writings have appeared in, among others, The Globe & Mail, Al Jazeera, Al-Monitor, An-Nahar (Arabic), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Iranian Diplomacy, Huffington Post, the Harvard International Review and the South China Morning Post.

He holds a specialized Honours BA in political science from York University, and an LLB (Common Law) and LLL (Civil Law) from the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, graduating magna cum laude. He also holds a Master’s degree from Stanford University, where his thesis on regional security cooperation in West Asia, under the supervision of Professor Jenny S. Martinez, the current Provost of Stanford University, earned honors. He has earned advanced professional training certificates in international law, diplomacy and negotiations at, inter alia, the École nationale d’administration (Paris), Harvard Law School, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the Jordan Institute of Diplomacy and The Hague Academy of International Law.

He is a past lead articles editor and member of the submissions committee of the Stanford Journal of International Law, and a past senior editor and board member of the Ottawa Law Review. He was called to the bar (Law Society of Ontario, Canada) in 2004.

Shoamanesh is an inaugural member of the Council of Advisers to the Global Institute for the Prevention of Aggression. He is the recipient of the 2012 Arthur C. Helton Fellowship, awarded by the American Society of International Law, as well as the 2013 l’Ordre du mérite, the highest distinction awarded to alumni by the Civil Law Section of the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa.  He was selected as Munich Young Leader (class of 2017) at the 53rd edition of the Munich Security Conference. Shoamanesh is the recipient of the 2024 International Bar Association (IBA) Award for Outstanding Contribution by a Legal Practitioner to Human Rights “for his extraordinary dedication to defending human rights and cultivating the international Rule of Law for over two decades, particularly during his work at the [ICC].”

Email: sasan.shoamanesh@i21cq.com