Lyal S. Sunga

Photo of Lyal S. Sunga, former investigator, UN Security Council

Lyal S. Sunga is a specialist on international human rights, humanitarian and criminal law.

UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

In late August 1994, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights José Ayala Lasso called upon Sunga to bolster the UN Security Council's investigations into the massive violations of human rights and International humanitarian law perpetrated during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He served as Human Rights Officer in the United Nations as a staff member from 1994 to 2001, working mainly on problems relating to serious human rights and humanitarian law violations, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, terrorism and counter-terrorism, and on practical issues involving war and recovery from post-conflict situations through fact-finding, monitoring, investigation and reporting. Since leaving the UN as a staff member, Sunga has served as expert consultant for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations University, and United Nations Development Program.

From September to December 2007 Sunga took leave from the Raoul Wallenberg Institute to work as Geneva-based coordinator of the UN Human Rights Council's Group of Experts on Darfur, mandated to assess the Government of the Sudan's implementation of UN recommendations concerning serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law committed during the war in Darfur.

National human rights institutions

Sunga has provided training and technical assistance to National Human Rights Commissions in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nepal, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey and Uganda. In May 2012, he launched a major study on the role of national human rights institutions in federal States which he prepared for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Moscow at a conference with representatives of more than 60 national human rights institutions of the Russian Federation.

University teaching

Sunga is an adjunct professor at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy where he teaches courses on international criminal law, human rights, terrorism and counter-terrorism, public international law, and genocide at masters and undergraduate levels. He is also an affiliated professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund University, Sweden. Previously, he served as visiting professor in peace studies, international relations, global politics at the American University of Rome, visiting professor at the Strathmore University School of Law in Nairobi, Kenya, and RWI visiting professor and doctoral supervisor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and in 2006 he taught a human rights masters course at the Peking University Law School in Beijing, China, at a time when there were few if any other such masters programs being offered in mainland China. In addition, Sunga has been a lecturer, senior lecturer, or visiting professor in faculties of law at McGill University, Carleton University, Helsinki University, Padjadjaran University, University of Geneva, and from 2001 to 2005, he served as an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and the director of the Master of Laws in Human Rights.

Lectures and training in post-Soviet countries

From 2015 to 2021, Sunga gave masters-level human rights classes in UN-sponsored summer programs at Kazan Federal University, Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, Perm State University. and Voronezh State University.

Other human rights work and media appearances

He is also a former special advisor on human rights and humanitarian law at the International Development Law Organization in Rome, Italy.

External links

• Home Page for lyalsunga.com - Lyal S. Sunga's Website
• Lyal S. Sunga - Raoul Wallenberg Institute