Dr Mark Ellis, the President of ILAC Board of Directors, is executive director of the International Bar Association, the world’s foremost organisation of lawyers.
Prior to joining the IBA, he spent ten years as the first Executive Director of the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI), a project of the American Bar Association (ABA). Providing technical legal assistance to twenty-eight countries in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, and to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, CEELI remains one of the most extensive international pro bono legal assistance project ever undertaken by the US legal community.
Dr Ellis served as Legal Advisor to the Independent International Commission on Kosovo and was appointed by OSCE to advise on the creation of Serbia’s War Crimes Tribunal. He was actively involved with the Iraqi High Tribunal. He was appointed Chair of the UN created Advisory Panel on Matters Relating to Defence Counsel of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals. Twice a Fulbright Scholar to Croatia, he earned his J.D. and B.S. degrees from Florida State University and his PhD from King’s College, London.