Chibli Mallat

Founded by his father Wajdi Mallat in Beirut in 1949, Mallat Law Offices is one of the oldest law firms in the Middle East, recognized for important successes in domestic litigation, including succession and estates, administrative, and business law.

Chibli Mallat (born May 10, 1960) is a Lebanese international lawyer, legal scholar, and a former candidate for presidency in Lebanon.

A third case was won against Muammar Gaddafi in Beirut courts for the families of the historic leader of the Shi'i community Musa al-Sadr and his two companions, journalist Abbas Badreddin and cleric Muhammad Ya`qub, who disappeared in Libya upon their official invitation by Gaddafi in August 1978.

His main focus since 1982 was Iraq as key to change in the Middle East, and he founded the International Committee for a Free Iraq (ICFI) in 1991 with Edward Mortimer and Ahmad Chalabi to seek the end of dictatorship in Baghdad.

The ICFI brought together about a hundred Iraqi and international personalities, including leading US senators like Claiborne Pell, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and John McCain, as well as British MP David Howell, then chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, and respected Arab public figures like Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Adonis, see Adunis.

He held research and teaching positions at the University of California Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1984-85 and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where as a lecturer in Islamic Law he received his first tenured position in 1992.

Educated in Lebanon, the United States and Europe, Mallat received his PhD from the law department of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1990.

Other cases he pursued included one against Saddam Hussein, who was the object of an international campaign initiated in 1995 by Mallat with officials in Kuwait, London and Washington that developed into INDICT, a nongovernmental organisation he helped found in Britain in 1996.

The practice continued and was developed internationally upon Mallat's return to Beirut from London in 1995.

In addition to victims of mass crime, the firm's clients include governments, embassies, multi-national companies and business and political leaders.

He taught at the Islamic University in Lebanon in 1995-96, and was twice visiting professor at the University of Lyon and at the University of Virginia School of Law.

He was also Senior Schell Fellow at Yale Law School's International Human Rights Center and a Kluge scholar at the Library of Congress.

By 1998, INDICT had received open support in the American Congress and in the British Parliament, and was embraced by then US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Mallat also helped establish the Middle East regional office of Amnesty International in Beirut in 1999 for which his law firm has acted since as legal counsel.

First led by directors Kamel Labidi and Ahmad Karaoud, both former prisoners of opinion in Tunisia, the regional office formed an inspiring precedent to a multitude of civil society organizations across the Middle East focusing on the promotion of human rights, accountability, and the abolition of the death penalty.

In 2000, he received professorial tenure at Saint Joseph University (USJ) in Lebanon and was appointed a year later to the first EU Jean Monnet Chair in European Law in the Middle East.

The campaign laid the ground for a case against Saddam Hussein in Belgium in 2002, and his eventual trial in Iraq in 2005.

In his law practice, he is best known for bringing the case of Victims of Sabra and Shatila v. Ariel Sharon et al., under the law of universal jurisdiction in Belgium, where his clients won a judgment on 12 February 2003 against the accused before a change in Belgian law removed the jurisdiction of the court.

Many of the committee's Iraqi members became the leaders of Iraq after the end of Baathist dictatorship in 2003, including Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum as the first president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Jalal Talibani as president and Hoshyar Zebari as Foreign Minister.

Mallat was opposed to the US-led invasion, and sought with the support of then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz an alternative Security Council Resolution that would have declared Saddam Hussein's presidency illegitimate and advocated the deployment of human rights monitors in Iraq during the transition to democracy.

He visited Iraq in late 2003 and again in early 2004 to accelerate the recognition of the Iraqi Governing Council as the official government of Iraq, a move opposed by Paul Bremer and Kofi Annan.

In 2004, the EU Commission bestowed its 'Center of Excellence' label to the Chair and the Directorate-General of the Education and Culture at the EU Commission honored it as 'A Success Story' in 2007.

In 2005, he declined the Iraqi government's invitation to head the tribunal that eventually tried Saddam Hussein.

In his native Lebanon, Mallat ran for president in 2005-2006 in an unprecedented challenge to the incumbent, Emile Lahoud, who had relied on the Damascus government of Bashar al-Asad to force an unconstitutional extension of his mandate.

During the Cedar Revolution which was triggered by the assassination of the president's main opponent, Rafiq al-Hariri, Mallat was active in street protests and in the leadership, where his central advocacy was the establishment of an international, hybrid tribunal to arrest and try the assassins of Hariri and scores of other victims - eventually known as the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and the removal of the 'coercively-extended president' from power.' Mallat's campaign was initiated in November 2005 to push a fractured and direction-less revolution towards its active materialisation in a presidency 'that looked like the people who made it.'

Denigrated by some as 'quixotic', the campaign was received in the local, regional and international media as a breakthrough for Arab democracy in its direct, people-based nonviolent challenge to dictators for life.

Over a period of seven months, Mallat's team took its message to several cities and villages of Lebanon, and was supported by unprecedented mobilisation of the Lebanese diaspora, especially in the US.

In 2006-2007, he spent one year at Princeton University where he was a Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, Fellow in the University Center for Human Values, Fellow in the Program in International and Regional Studies and a Distinguished Visitor in the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice.

Internationally, the campaign culminated in a Security Council Presidential Statement that undermined the legitimacy of Emile Lahoud, and translated in a mass popular meeting on 14 March 2006 with a single motto: 'Lahoud must go'.

As 'the primary architect' of Lahoud's demise, Mallat joined with the leadership of the March 14 coalition to develop his constitutional, nonviolent plan to replace Lahoud by a freely elected president.

A tenured professor of Middle Eastern Politics and Law at the University of Utah since 2007 and Presidential Professor since 2009, Mallat was appointed in 2011 Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

In 2008-10, Mallat was senior legal advisor to the Global Justice Project: Iraq, which he initiated with Hiram Chodosh, the dean of the law school at the University of Utah.

The large team of scholars, operating as legal think-tank in Baghdad, advised the Iraqi government on legislation, constitutional review, and treaties.

Mallat was invited to sit on the Constitutional Review Committee led by Humam Hamoudi, and completed with the committee a revision of the Constitution in October 2009.

He taught in Fall 2012 at Yale Law School as Visiting Professor of Law and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow. In Spring 2015, he was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

In Summer 2014, he helped the Iraqi president Fouad Masum and Parliamentary Speaker Salim al-Jabouri construct the constitutional argument that put an end to the Prime Ministership of Nouri al-Maliki.

In 2016, he helped found Humanist Lebanon, organizing regular demonstrations in the centre of Beirut to end the presidential void in the name of the Constitution.

In 2017, he resigned his full-time positions at Saint Joseph's University and at the University of Utah, but remained on the University of Utah's law faculty as Emeritus Presidential Professor of Law.

In 2023, he was invited as visiting senior fellow at the school of law of Sciences-Po in Paris to develop his work on comparative constitutional law.

Mallat has been active in human rights and democratic advocacy since his high school days.