O-Gon Kwon is a noted international South Korean judge, best known for being one of the three judges in the trial of Slobodan Milošević. He also sat on the bench for the trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.
A judge at the Seoul District Court in 1979 and 1980, Kwon became Assistant Legal Advisor to President Chun Doo-hwan of Korea, a position he held until 1984. Between 1986 and 1990, he was a judge at the Seoul Criminal District Court and Judge at the Daegu High Court. From 1990 to 1992, Judge Kwon was Planning Director at the Ministry of Court Administration. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Judge at the Supreme Court of South Korea. Between 1993 and 1999, he served as a Presiding Judge, successively in the Changwon, Suwon, and Seoul District Courts. In the meantime, he also served as Director of Research at the Constitutional Court of Korea from 1997 to 1999. He was a Presiding Judge at the Daegu High Court when elected as a Judge of the ICTY by the UN General Assembly. At the ICTY, Kwon served on the bench which heard the trial of Slobodan Milošević, and has also been involved in several pre-trial proceedings, contempt trials and sentencing judgments. Currently a member of Trial Chamber II, Judge Kwon sits on the bench hearing the case of Prosecutor v. Popović et al. He is also a member of the Referral Bench, which determines whether certain cases pending before the Tribunal are suitable to be referred for trial in national courts. In addition, he is a member of the Tribunal's Rules Committee, which is charged with proposing additions and modifications to the Rules of Procedure and Evidence. In addition to his work at the ICTY, Judge Kwon has served as a member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Criminal Justice since 2007. He is a member of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative Advisory Council, a project of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis to establish the world’s first treaty on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.
Judge and Vice-President
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is an entity which is chartered as a court of law by the United Nations to investigate and prosecute war crimes, which occurred throughout the Balkans in the 1990s. The Tribunal adjudicated conflict atrocities such as ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. In 2001, O-Gon Kwon was sworn in as Judge of the Tribunal on 17 November. As one of the Tribunal's judges his responsibilities included determining the guilt or innocence of those accused of perpetrating war crimes during the Balkan conflict, and he was tasked with passing sentence on the convicted. By virtue of a mandate, he became Vice President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in November 2008. Kwon was re-elected to a new two-year term as Vice President in November 2009. In 2011, Kwon was elected by the Coalition for the International Criminal Court as one of the five members in the Independent Panel on International Criminal Court Judicial Elections.
Presiding Judge for the Trial Against Radovan Karadžić
Judge Kwon served as the Presiding Judge for the case of former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžić, and handed him a 40 year sentence on 24 March 2016.
