Assistant Professor Stewart joined the law school in August 2009, after spending two years as an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School in New York. Prior to his time at Columbia, Professor Stewart was an Appeals Counsel with the Prosecution of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He has also worked for the Legal Division of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Prosecution of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. His research interests include international criminal law, the laws of armed conflict, international human rights, comparative criminal law, theory of criminal law, public International law, counter-terrorism, corporate criminal liability, corporate responsibility for international crimes and the Great Lakes Region in Africa.
Professor Stewart initially graduated from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand with degrees in both law and philosophy. He has since completed an Diplôme d'études approfondies in international humanitarian law at the Université de Genève as a Boursier d'excellence de la Confédération suisse and a JSD at Columbia University in New York. He has taught at Columbia Law School, NYU Law School, and the University of Geneva. Professor Stewart was also the Chair of Editorial Board of Journal of International Criminal Justice between 2007 and 2010, and is presently an appointed member of the Institute of International Humanitarian Law. Different aspects of his work have been cited by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, The Special Court for Sierra Leone, the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon and the International Criminal Court.
In 2006, Professor Stewart received the La Pira Prize for his article on unlawful confinement at Guantanamo. In 2010, he was awarded the Cassese Prize for his ongoing work on the liability of corporate actors for international crimes. That year, he was also a Fellow with the Open Society Initiative in New York for an aspect of this work that deals with the accomplice liability of arms vendors. As part of this project, he was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford's Centre for Criminology. In 2011, he was awarded the Aurora Prize from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) as "an outstanding new researcher who is building a reputation for exciting and original research in the social sciences or humanities." He was a Global Hauser Fellowship at New York University for the 2012/2013 academic year.
Professor Stewart was also the first recipient of the Antonio Cassese Prize for International Criminal Law Studies. This award was established last year by the Journal of International Criminal Studies, and is given to the author of the most original and innovative paper published in the journal since its inception in 2003. Professor Stewart was honored with the prestigious award at a ceremony held on February 18th in Geneva. His ongoing work entitled "Atrocity, Commerce and Accountability: The International Criminal Liability of Corporate Actors," was noted as an equality innovative contribution to the discipline. The prize included 10,000 euros to assist this research.
"The award is a tremendous personal honor, but more importantly, it's tacit endorsement of the ideas that animate this research," said Professor Stewart. "We are on the threshold of a major shift in international criminal justice, towards a regime that is more conscious of the relationship between commerce and atrocity, and more sensitive to the importance of holding corporate actors accountable. I'm grateful to the journal's board for supporting a project that I hope will act as a catalyst for this change in focus."
The award was presented by Professors Andrew Clapham, Paola Gaeta, and Salvatore Zappal, in the presence of other academics, staff of international institutions and practitioners of international criminal law.