Matthew Parish

Parish attended Harrogate Grammar School before he moved to Cambridge University where he graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1996 with Triple First Class Honours. In 2004, he earned a Master of law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, and a Doctor of Juridical Science in 2007, with a thesis titled 'Reconstructing a divided society: learning from northeast Bosnia' [3] whose Supervisors were the distinguished US Justice Richard A. Posner and his son, the renowned American political scientist Eric Posner.

From 2000, Parish has been a non-practicing English barrister, English solicitor, a member of the Swiss bar and a New York attorney since 2005.[2][1]

Parish is the Chair of the International Law Association's New York Committee on the Accountability of International Organizations. He is the author of at least several books and many hundreds of articles on international law, international relations and international public policy.[4]

He is an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Leicester.[5]

Before 2005 Parish worked in the legal department of the World Bank.[2]

Between 2005 and 2007 Parish worked as head of legal department for the Brcko Final Award Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR).[1] Shortly after leaving Bosnia in 2007, Parish wrote "The Demise of the Dayton Protectorate",[6] which was later used to argue for closure of the OHR.[7][8] He then moved to Geneva, where he worked in different law firms and held positions as visiting lecturer and Honorary Professor in various universities.[1]

Parish still writes occasional columns for the Sarajevo-based newspaper Oslobodjenje and for the regional online outlet Balkan Insight.[2]

Parish's book on reconstruction in post-war Brcko, A Free City in the Balkans (2009),[9] has attracted domestic and international attention.[10][11] The book has been criticized for being too sceptical of the international community's statebuilding efforts in the country.[12][13]

In 2010 Parish wrote a commentary on the 22 July 2010 decision of the International Court of Justice declaring Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence to be lawful.[14] He expresses the view that while Kosovo's independence was inevitable, judicial determination of the issue was unsatisfactory as a matter of policy.

Parish's book Mirages of International Justice (2011) [15] advances a constructivist account of international law. He thinks sovereign states would never agree to create genuinely impartial and independent international courts that would enforce international law against themselves. Thus international courts are deliberately made powerless, and they occupy precarious roles in the balance of power in which they are liable to make decisions in accordance with Great Power interests. International tribunals proliferate not because states want to see international justice done but because they want to associate themselves with the ideals captured in discourse about international law without making any real commitments. The world of international relations remains an anarchy, but international courts (and indeed international organizations in general) are part of an illusion that the world is ordered in accordance with moral principles. Nevertheless, Parish is a defender of controversial investment treaty arbitration, a system of international law that allows investors to sue states.

Parish was elected as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum in 2013[16] and has also been named as one of the 300 most influential people in Switzerland by Bilan Magazine.[17]

Parish spoke to the UN General Assembly in April 2013 in a meeting organized by its then President Vuk Jeremic.[18] He chaired a debate about the effectiveness of international criminal justice, and how it might be made more efficient and improved. Parish was a key supporter of and Chief International Political Advisor to Jeremic in his campaign to become elected UN Secretary General in 2016, and his firm, Gentium Law Group, was reported as a principal supporter Jeremic, who came in second behind António Guterres.[19]

Parish has given evidence to both the European Parliament and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US Congress in 2016[20] on issues relating to international organizations and international law. He is an advocate of free trade and open-market economics, and says that international investment is a consequence of free trade.

Parish has published a series of articles[21][22][23] expressing sympathy for the 2017 Catalan independence movement and spent several months mandated to study the independence process in Catalonia.

Parish is a scholar of the jurisprudence of both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and international criminal law in general.[24][25][26]

Parish left Akin Gump's Geneva office for Holman Fenwick Willan’s (HFW) Geneva office in 2011.[27]. In December 2014 he and a colleague at HFW set up their own practice, Gentium Law Group.[28][29]. In July 2017 the partner sold his share of the company to Parish and left.[30] In November 2018 he ceased to manage the company having handed control to a new partner[31]. The company was dissolved due to bankruptcy in June 2019.[32].

Parish is reported as having represented a number of governments, including Turkey, Tajikistan and Gulf monarchies, as well as commodities-trading companies in their litigation interests.[2] Gentium was one of the first in a new breed of "boutique" arbitration law firms that involves teams of senior arbitration lawyers splitting away from large established law firms and forming their own smaller practices under new brands. Gentium thrived, while the Geneva office of the law firm from which it departed fared less well.[33] The group was the first firm to be nominated as a Global Arbitration Review Top 100 Law Firm worldwide within the first year of its operation.[34] The Gentium Law Group, has been named by Global Arbitration Review[35] in consecutive years as one of the top one hundred law firms worldwide in its field.

In 2013 and 2018 Parish was named as one of the three hundred most influential people in Switzerland.[36]

Parish was detained by the Geneva Prosecutor's Office in May 2018 on allegations by two Russian oil traders, Murat Seitnepesov and Konstantin Ryndin of Integral Petroleum SA, of criminal defamation related to the reporting to western intelligence agencies of violations of sanctions against Iran.[37][38][39][40][41] He was released and later charged and found guilty of criminal defamation for making the reports to Western intelligence services accusing his former clients, Murat Seitnepesov and Konstantin Ryndin, of money laundering, fraud and financing terrorism.[42][43][44] Parish indicated his intention to appeal the conviction.[45]

He was also indicted for his alleged role in a fake arbitration in a dispute between rival members of the Kuwaiti ruling family about the authenticity of videos showing corruption and breach of Iran sanctions, but those allegations were dismissed on the basis that there was there was no case to answer.[46][47][48][49][50] As a result of his experiences he became an active member of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

• A Free City in the Balkans: Reconstructing a Divided Society in Bosnia I.B. Tauris, London, October 2009. ISBN 978-1848850026
• Mirages of International Justice: The Elusive Pursuit of a Transnational Legal Edward Elgar, London, May 2011. ISBN 978-1849804080
• Ethnic Civil War and the Promise of Law Edward Elgar, London, 2016. ISBN 978-0857934192