David Kretzmer

David Kretzmer, Professor of Law, was elected to the International Commission of Jurists "in October 2003. He is also the Bruce W. Wayne Professor of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main fields of interest are constitutional law, human rights and international humanitarian law. In 1993 he established the Centre for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from 1997-2000 he served as first academic director of the Minerva Centre for Human Rights, a joint centre of the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. From 1995-2002 he was a member of the Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, serving as vice-chair of the Committee from 2001-2002.

"Kretzmer has been a visiting professor at the law schools of the University of Southern California (1979, and 1984-85), Tulane University (1989), Bar-Ilan University (2001-2002) and Columbia University (2003). He has also been a visiting fellow at University College, Oxford (1990), the Max Planck Institute for International and Comparative Public Law in Heidelburg (2000) and the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway (2002-2003).

"Kretzmer was a founding member of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and served as chairperson of its executive board in 1985-86 and 1988-89. He was on the founding council of B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and served on the first executive committee of HaMoked, The Center for Defence of the Individual.

"His recent publications include: The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel, 2nd edition (Center for Study of Arab Society in Israel, 2002) (in Arabic), The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories (SUNY Press, 2002) and The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse, edited together with Eckart Klein (Kluwer Law International, 2002). Other publications include articles on freedom of speech and racism, the right to demonstrate, judicial review over parliamentary decisions, application of the Fourth Geneva Convention in the Occupied Territories, human rights jurisprudence of Israel's Supreme Court, and the duty to protect human rights."

• Director, B'Tselem
• Former Director (1997-2000), Minerva Center for Human Rights