Diego García Sayán

Diego García-Sayán Larrabure (born August 2, 1950), is a former Justice and Foreign Affairs Minister of Perú, and until recently a sitting judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.^[1] after having presided over it in the period from 2010 to 2012. On August 15, 2014, the Peruvian Government formally announced its launching of Dr. Garcia-Sayan's candidacy in the upcoming 2015 election for the post of Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), a decision which was rescinded unilaterally by the candidate himself on October 1, 2014, as a result of what he said was the said Government's lack of proper support towards that end.

Biography[]

García Sayán was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest son of Dr. Enrique García-Sayán, a former Foreign Affairs Minister of Perú who, in 1946, was associated, along with President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, with launching the so-called "200 Nautical Miles (370.4 km) Territorial Doctrine", currently being adhered to and claimed by Benin, Congo, Ecuador, El Salvador, Liberia, Perú and Somalia. After the 1948 coup d´état which overthrew the constitutionally elected Government of President Bustamante, Dr. García-Sayán went into exile, working with the United Nations first in New York, then in Geneva, which led a year later to his son Diego's birth in the United States.

Professional activities[]

García Sayán co-founded the Peruvian Center for International Studies (CEPEI) in 1980. On 27 January 2017, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres designated him a member of the Selection Mechanism for the Special Jurisdiction of Peace, established in Colombia in 2016.^[2] He has also served as the Chairperson of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.^[3] In the Peruvian government he has served as a member of Congress (2000) and, as noted earlier, has held the portfolios of Minister of Justice, (2000–2001) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (2001–2002).^[4] In 2007, he was unanimously elected, by his peers at the Court, to serve as the Court's Vice President for the 2008–09 period and, on 25 November 2009, to be its President for the 2010-12 period.^[4] He is also a member of Washington D.C. based think tank the Inter-American Dialogue.^[5] Since January 2017 he is Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers for the United Nations.^[6] He is also currently serving as an Advisory Board member of the Global Judicial Integrity Network at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).^[7]

Education[]

García Sayán attended the "Santa Maria" School, graduating from high-school in 1967. He then attended the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1969. He continued his studies at the University of Texas, at Austin in 1970, and returned to the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru for his law degree in 1975, where he has, since then, also taught law.

On his spare time, Mr. Garc��a Sayán is a percussionist and motorcycle enthusiast, the former from his times as a teenager, when he and several of his school friends as well as others from other schools, formed the rock group Los Hang Ten's.

References[]

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Diego García-Sayán.

• Judge Diego García Sayán, Inter-American Court
• ICHR orders abolition of mandatory death sentence
• Human rights court decision handed down in Barbados case
• Globalization and the struggle against discrimination and exclusion, a statement by Diego García Sayán
• Diego García-Sayan: Latin America needs to deal with its human rights past in a court of law^{[permanent dead link]}