Moroccan jurist Mohamed Ayat was appointed, on Thursday in Geneva, as UN independent expert on human rights in Ivory Coast.
The appointment of this researcher in international law was approved unanimously at a plenary session by the UN council of human rights.
Member of the National Council on Human Rights (CNDH), the Moroccan expert is also a legal advisor to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Mohamed Ayat, holder of a 1979 PhD in law from the University of Toulouse (France), has been elected to the United Nations Human Rights Committee of the United Nations from September 2008 to August 2009.
He is also founding member of the research group ILM on “Islam: law and modernity”, based at Durham University in the Netherlands, he further serves as a research professor at the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and is the author of several works devoted to the transitional justice and criminology.
He contributed to an international research project on justice after armed conflict, led by the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences (Italy), a well as to several studies on the Moroccan experience in Transitional Justice.
Mr. Ayat also took part in 2008 to the drafting of model codes of transitional justice sponsored by the United Nations as a lawyer representing the Muslim world.
As an independent expert of the UN, his mandate includes assessing the situation of human rights in Ivory Coast and providing assistance to the authorities and stakeholders to promote the culture of protection and respect of these rights and strengthening the
