Chibli Mallat

Chibli Mallat during a speech at the Salzburg Seminar in September 2007

Chibli Mallat (May 10, 1960) is a human rights lawyer and a former candidate for presidency in Lebanon.

Career

Lawyer and law professor

In his law practice, he is best known for bringing the case of Victims of Sabra and Shatila v. Ariel Sharon et al., under the law of universal jurisdiction in Belgium, where his clients won a judgment on 12 February 2003 against the accused before a change in Belgian law removed the jurisdiction of the court. As a democratic activist, he was involved with the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein, even spending a brief moment in an Iranian jail after organizing international monitoring of the first free elections ever in Iraq, in May 1992. Mallat helped establish the Middle East regional office of Amnesty International in Beirut in 1999 for which his office has acted since as legal counsel. He is a frequent op-ed contributor in newspapers ranging from the Nahar (Lebanon) to the New York Times, and has held research and teaching positions at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, where he received his first tenured position in 1991, Yale Law School, the University of Virginia Law School,[1] the University of Lyon, the Library of Congress, The Islamic University of Lebanon and the University of California Boalt School of Law. In 2000, he received a professorial tenure at Saint Joseph University in Lebanon and was appointed a year later to the first EU Jean Monnet Chair in the Middle East. In 2004, the EU Commission bestowed its 'Center of Excellence'[2] label to the Chair. The EU Parliament considered it 'A Success Story'[3] in 2007.

In 2006-2007, he spent one year at Princeton University where he was a Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, Fellow in the University Center for Human Values, Fellow in the Program in International and Regional Studies and a Distinguished Visitor in the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice.

In 2007, he moved to Utah and became a tenured professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Law at the University of Utah, and was named in 2009 Presidential Professor. In 2011, he was appointed The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

Human Rights and Politics

Mallat has been active in human rights and democratic advocacy since his high school days. His main focus since 1982 was Iraq as key to change in the Middle East, and he founded the International Committee for a Free Iraq (ICFI) in 1991 with Edward Mortimer and Ahmad Chalabi to seek the end of dictatorship in Baghdad. The ICFI brought together about a hundred Iraqi and international personalities, including leading US senators like Claiborne Pell, then Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and John McCain, the Republican Senator who became a major contender for the presidency; senior British MPs like David Howell, then chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, and respected Arab public figures like Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Adonis. Many of the Committee's Iraqi members became the leaders of Iraq after the end of Baathist dictatorship in 2003, including Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum as the first president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Jalal Talibani as president and Hoshyar Zebari as Foreign Minister. Mallat was opposed to the US-ledinvasion, and sought with the support of then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz an alternative Security Council Resolution that would have declared Saddam Hussein's presidency illegitimate and advocated the deployment of human rights monitors in Iraq during the transition to democracy. Also with the support of Wolfowitz, he visited Iraq in late 2003 and early 2004 to accelerate the recognition of the Iraqi Governing Council as the official government of Iraq, a move opposed by Paul Bremer and Kofi Annan. In 2005, he declined the Iraqi government's invitation to head the tribunal that eventually tried Saddam Hussein. In 2008-10, Mallat was senior legal advisor to the Global Justice Project: Iraq in Baghdad, advising the Iraqi government on legislation, constitutional review, and treaties. He was invited to sit on the Constitutional Review Committee led by Humam Hamoudi, and completed with the Committee a revision of the Constitution in October 2009.

Presidential Campaign

In his native Lebanon, Mallat ran for president in 2005-2006 in an unprecedented challenge to the incumbent, Emile Lahoud, who had relied on the Damascus government of Bashar al-Asad to force an unconstitutional extension of his mandate. During the Cedar Revolution which was triggered by the assassination of the president's main opponent, Rafiq al-Hariri, Mallat was active in street protests and in the leadership, where his central advocacy was the establishment of an international, hybrid tribunal to arrest and try the assassins of Hariri and scores of other victims - eventually known as the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and the removal of the 'coercively-extended president' from power. Mallat's campaign was initiated in November 2005 to push a fractured and direction-less revolution towards its active materialisation in a presidency 'that looked like the people who made it.'

While denigrated by some as 'quixotic', the campaign was overwhelmingly received in the local, regional and international media as a breakthrough for Arab democracy in its direct, people-based nonviolent challenge to dictators for life. Over a period of seven months, Mallat's team took its message to several cities and villages of Lebanon, and was supported by unprecedented mobilisation of the Lebanese diaspora, especially in the US. Internationally, the campaign culminated in a Security Council Presidential Statement that undermined the legitimacy of Emile Lahoud, and in a mass popular meeting on 14 March 2006 with a single motto: 'Lahoud must go'. As 'the main architect' of Lahoud's demise, Mallat joined with the leadership of the March 14 coalition to develop his constitutional, nonviolent plan to replace Lahoud by a freely elected president. Despite his agreement with then key Lebanese leaders Saad Hariri, Walid Jumblat, and Samir Geagea, his plan was scuttled by their hesitation, and by the pro-Syrian speaker Nabih Berri's call for a dialogue in which presidential change was drowned amongst several secondary items. With the political deadlock that ensued, Mallat predicted a new bout of 'immense violence' descending on the country.

When the war against Israel was triggered against the will of most Lebanese by Hizbullah on 12 July 2006, Mallat was forced to interrupt his campaign on the ground. He denounced the attack of Hizbullah and debated its foreign affairs representative on television in the midst of the bombardments. Soon after the ceasefire, which he had helped engineer through an active collaboration with the Lebanese government acting foreign minister, he took up an offer by Princeton University out from harm's way, and left for the US with his family. At Princeton, he completed six books, including two about the campaign, and a scholarly work which established a new field of legal studies which he calls 'Middle Eastern Law' that includes Islamic law but is not restricted to it.

Middle East Nonviolent Change

Mallat remains actively engaged for Middle East democracy as scholar and activist.

In pursuit of radical nonviolent change, he founded in 2009 Right to Nonviolence, an international NGO which advocates and supports nonviolence, constitutional reform and judicial accountability. Right to Nonviolence has been active in the Arab Spring, which Mallat prefers calling the 'Middle East Nonviolent Revolution' to englobe Israel and Iran. As constitutional expert, he helped draft the early constitutional amendments in Egypt after the removal of Husni Mubarak. In March 2011, he was asked by the Bahraini leadership and opposition, and the US State Department, to help jumpstart the political process by producing a Constitutional Options paper. The trip to Manama to restart the dialogue was interrupted on 15 March 2011 as he was boarding the plane. Amidst an increase of tension on the street, the hardliners in government had decided to go for all out repression of the Pearl Revolution.

Over the years, Mallat developed a theory of nonviolence combined with his work as a lawyer seeking accountability for the most heinous political crimes known as crimes against humanity. In addition to the case against Sharon, which showed for the first time to an Arab and international audience that nonviolence through international law may be a far more effective tool than war, he was at the forefront of the cases brought against Saddam Hussein, Muammar Kaddafi, then Husni Mubarak and the falling dictators of the Middle East Revolution.

Writings

Mallat is the author or editor of over thirty five books, and the author of dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters in English, French and Arabic around the world.

Collaborative work

Academic collaborative work has seen him serving as a joint founder and general editor for five volumes of the Yearbook on Islamic and Middle Eastern Law., a series on 'Horizons Europeens' at Centre d'Etudes de l'Union Europeenne at Saint Joseph University, a series on Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at Kluwer Law International, and a series on Iraqi law at Oxford University Press.

Islamic and Middle Eastern law

In his work on Islamic and Middle Eastern law, he has engaged scholarship from the West and from the Middle East in a search for a common language of human rights and the rule of law to be conveyed from within the uniquely rich legal tradition of the Middle East from Hammurabi to the present. His first book, the Renewal of Islamic Law, which focused on the legal works of the most innovative Islamic scholar of the 20th century, the Iraqi Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, received the North America Middle East Studies Association its highest annual prize. Its Arabic version, published in 1998, circulated underground in Iraq until the demise of Saddam Hussein in 2003. It was reprinted several times since in Iraq. The Renewal, which was reviewed in over a hundred academic and press outlets, brought the image of a humanist scholarship at the highest intellectual level to the West. His Introduction to Middle Eastern Law, the result of twenty years of research, appeared at Oxford University Press in 2007, and expanded the field of Islamic law to include the Middle East pre-Islamic legal tradition as an important component for serious research, and to prominently feature case law as a novel focus for a multi-layered legacy. In the classical period, it includes archival work on the court registers that is brought out systematically for the first time in the legal field. In the modern period, the Introduction covers the main fields of law in the operation of the courts of Middle East courts from Pakistan to Morocco.

European and international law

In European and international law, his writings have focused on the formation of the European Union with a particular attention to the shortcomings of the institutional structure in the EU's democratic deficit, the deadlocks of the exit mechanisms for nonconforming countries, including the Euro, and the rise of what he calls the rise of the Euro-Mediterranean legal continent. In international law, he uses the Middle East as the privileged terrain of the understanding of the interaction between international criminal law, diplomacy and politics, especially through his defense of victims of crimes against humanity in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and Libya.

Nonviolence and law

In his more theoretical work on law and nonviolence, Mallat seeks to articulate the difficult relation between the inherent violence of the democratic state and the search for Kantian perpetual peace. He considers himself as an eclectic disciple of a number of twentieth century maverick thinkers, most prominently the encyclopedic writings of Robert Fossaert in France, the conceptualisation of the courts' role in society in the works of John Hart Ely and the American constitutional tradition, the progressive humanism of Kamal Jumblat and the aggiornamento of the Islamic legal tradition by Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr.

Nonfiction

Mallat grew up in a family steeped in a tradition of literature and law. His namesake grandfather was known across the Arab world as 'the Poet of the Cedars'. His grand uncle Tamer Mallat was a judge and a poet, whose decisions and poetry were rediscovered and published in facsimile editions, and he edited some of his father's writings in a bi-lingual French and Arabic book. He published with his son Tamer, then aged five, an illustrated book for children, 'Aventures a Beyrouth.'[4]

Personal life

He is the son of Nouhad Diab and Wajdi Mallat, the first president of the Constitutional Council (Arabic المجلس الدستوري) of Lebanon, from 1994 to 1997, and has three sisters, Manal, Raya and Janane. He was educated in Lebanon, Europe and the United States. He currently divides his time between Salt Lake City, Utah and Beirut. He is married to Nayla Chalhoub, and they have two grown-up sons, Tamer and Wajdi.

Sample of publications

• Introduction to Middle Eastern Law (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Democracy in America (Beirut, Nahar, in Arabic 2001)
• Presidential Choices (Beirut, 1998)
• The Middle East into the 21st Century (Garnet, 1996)
• The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhamad Baqer as-Sadr, Najaf, and the Shi'i International (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Arabic, Turkish, Indonesian translations.
• The diversity of Islamic law by Chibli Mallat, Salt Lake City, 20 June 2008, Address at the Afghanistan Project of the SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah.
• On Lawyering in Lebanon by Chibli Mallat, Talk presented at Yale law school, May 1, 2008
• Responsibility in the Hizbullah-Israel 2006 War : Jus in bello, jus ad bellum by Chibli Mallat, Address at Yale law school, May 1, 2008
• L'Islande et le Liban: Antipodes de l'UE, Chibli Mallat, David Thor Björgvinsson.
• Dossier sur la Philosophie du droit, Chibli Mallat.
• The speaker's questions which the US government should not answer by Chibli Mallat, The Daily Star, 5 Sept 2007.

External links

• Chibli Mallat's Homepage
• Chibli Mallat's Presidential Campaign
• Global Justice Project: Iraq