Professor John Cerone holds faculty appointments at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, American University Washington College of Law, and the University of London.
During the 2014-15 academic year, Professor Cerone was in residence at RWI as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. During this time, he also lectured in RWI’s Masters program in human rights, and participated in a number of RWI’s research and training projects.
He has taught in over 40 countries across all regions of the globe and is the author of dozens of articles and book chapters on international law, as well as the casebooks “Public International Law: Cases, Problems, and Texts” (with Stephen McCaffrey and Dinah Shelton) and “International Law” (with Valerie Epps and Brad Roth).
His areas of expertise related to Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, International Criminal Law, International Law in Conflict and Post-conflict Settings, Refugee Law and Migration Law, International Courts and Tribunals, Non-state Actors in International Law, Human Rights and International Business, Hate Speech and the Freedom of Expression, and Gender and International Law.
As a practicing international lawyer, he has worked for a number of IGOs and NGOs, including the U.N., the OSCE, the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the International Crisis Group, and has served as a legal adviser to various international criminal tribunals. He also has extensive field experience in conflict and post-conflict environments, including in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and East Timor. He is an elected member of the International Institute of Humanitarian Law (IIHL) and has served on a number of expert groups for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. He served as Special Adviser to the first U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Cerone received the President’s Award of the Boston Bar Association for his legal work on Guantanamo Bay issues, which includes representing human rights organizations in detainee litigation before U.S. courts and international human rights institutions. He has lectured at the IIHL (Sanremo), NATO Headquarters, the Institut International des Droits de l’Homme, the Inter-American Defense College, the Canadian Forces Staff College, the Swedish Defense University, the Academy on Human Rights & Humanitarian Law (AU WCL), and in the ICRC Annual Course, and has been keynote speaker at international conferences hosted by the U.S. Naval War College and by UNDP.
He has held Visiting Professor appointments at Boston University School of Law, the Heidelberg Center for Latin America, the National University of Ireland at Galway, and the University of San Diego School of Law, among others. In addition to his Fulbright Professorship at RWI, he has been awarded fellowships at the Nobel Institute (Oslo), the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the University of Auckland, the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and the International Criminal Court.