He was among survivors of the
Canal Hotel Bombing in
Iraq during which de Mello was killed with 20 other members of his staff on 19 August 2003.[6][7]
Work
Clapham has worked as Special Adviser on Corporate Responsibility to High Commissioner for Human Rights
Mary Robinson, and Adviser on International Humanitarian Law to
Sergio Vieira de Mello, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Iraq.[8] He has also been the representative of human rights group
Amnesty International to the United Nations between 1991 and 1994.[9]
In 2015, Clapham was among two international lawyers whose legal opinion Amnesty International commissioned to reach the conclusion that the United Kingdom was breaching the law by allowing the sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia despite knowing about their use to bomb civilians.[10]
In 2017, he was appointed to serve as a member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, charged with monitoring and assessing the human rights situation in the country.[11] He advises the government of Ukraine as part of the
Task Force on Accountability for Crimes Committed in Ukraine, a group of lawyers investigating war crimes committed during the war with Russia.[12]
His book The 1949 Geneva Conventions: A Commentary (Oxford University Press; co-edited with Paola Gaeta, and Marco Sassóli) won a Certificate of Merit from the
American Society of International Law for "a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship" in 2017.[13]
Clapham is often cited in the news media for his expertise in relation to the United Nations' efforts to hold perpetrators of war crimes accountable and uphold human rights law.[14][15][16][17][18][19][20]
Publications
Representative publications include:
War (Oxford, Oxford University Press) (2021) 624p
The 1949 Geneva Conventions, A Commentary (Oxford, Oxford University Press) (2015) 1760p
The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Armed Conflict, with Paola Gaeta, (Oxford, Oxford University Press) (2014) 1008p
Brierly's Law of Nations: An Introduction to the Role of International Law in International Relations (Oxford, Oxford University Press) (2012) 576p
"Corporations and Criminal Complicity‟ in Human Rights, Corporate Complicity and Disinvestment, G. Nystuen, A. Follesdal, and O. Mestad (eds) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, (2011), 222-242.
Realizing the Right to Health (Zurich: Rüffer and Rub) co-edited with
Mary Robinson (2009) 576p
Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press) (2007) 140p
Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors, (Oxford, Oxford University Press) (2006) 650p
International Human Rights Lexicon, with Susan Marks, (Oxford, Oxford University Press) (2005) 460p