Alex Whiting, an assistant clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, will join the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the investigation coordinator this December. On Monday, July 26, he spoke with WBUR radio about his new post.
Serving as the deputy to the chief of investigations, Whiting will be responsible for managing and providing legal guidance and direction to all of the ICC’s investigations in this new post. He will take on existing ICC investigations in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Kenya, among other countries.
Although the investigation and prosecution of war crimes is a slow, difficult process, Whiting told WBUR that when it comes to prosecuting genocide and war crimes, justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied.
Since joining the HLS faculty in 2007, Whiting has led the Law School’s clinical offerings on domestic and international prosecution, teaching Government Lawyer and the War Crimes Prosecution Workshop.
Prior to coming to HLS, Whiting was a senior trial attorney in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In 2007, he successfully prosecuted a case against Serbian rebel leader Milan Martic, who was sentenced to 35 years in jail by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities carried out in Croatia in the early 1990s.
Whiting also served domestically as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts and as a trial attorney in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. He holds a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale.