Academy Fellow

Professor Saul is recognised as ‘a leading academic expert on international terrorism law’ (United Nations Security Council’s Special Tribunal for Lebanon), helping to pioneer a new field of international law and shaping international legal practice. His monograph Defining Terrorism in International Law (2006) is the pre-eminent work on defining terrorism since the nineteenth century, and his Research Handbook on Terrorism and International Law (2014) has become a standard reference work. Professor Saul has a global reputation in public international law generally, particularly in human rights, the law of armed conflict, international criminal law, and refugee law. He has published 20 books and over 100 articles, and received numerous grants, including from the Australian Research Council. He is co-author of The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Oxford 2014), an authoritative resource on one of the world’s foremost human rights treaties. His research has been drawn on by the United Nations, international and national courts, governments, militaries, law enforcement, and civil society.

Professor Saul has made wider contributions to the legal profession, public policy, and public understanding of international legal issues. Internationally, he has been involved in cases before international courts; advised peak UN and international bodies, governments and NGOs; and undertaken legal work in over 35 countries. He has been involved setting new international standards, as in co-drafting the UN Model Legislative Provisions on Victims of Terrorism, and the UNODC law enforcement training curriculum on counter-terrorism. He was an expert member of the International Law Association’s (ILA) Committee for the Reparation of Victims of Armed Conflict.

He has taught at leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, and in India, China, Cambodia, and Italy. He has given lectures at the University of Cambridge; British Institute for International and Comparative Law; London School of Economics; New York University; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; University of Tehran; and for the UN Audio Visual Library of International Law. He was previously Editor in Chief of the Australian International Law Journal and serves on the editorial boards of the Indonesian Journal of International Law (University of Indonesia), Transnational Criminal Law Review, and Kathmandu School of Law Review. Professor Saul is on law school advisory boards in Pakistan and Nepal. He is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House and the International Centre for Counter-terrorism.

In Australia, Professor Saul has served on peak legal bodies including the National Human Rights Committee of the Law Council of Australia; Human Rights Committee of the NSW Legal Aid Commission; as Vice President of the ILA; National Committee of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights; and as Vice-President of Sydney PEN. He was President of the Refugee Advice & Casework Service and is on the Advisory Council of the Australian Centre for International Justice. Professor Saul has influenced law reform through over 100 submissions and numerous oral appearances before parliamentary committees and other inquiries. He has provided extensive media commentary on legal issues (as in The New York Times, BBC, The Economist and European, African, and Asian media).

Expert Consultant, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (current)

Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University

Special Course Lecturer, and Director of Studies, at The Hague Academy of International Law 

International Law Association, Committee on Compensation for Victims of Armed Conflict

Advisory Council, Australian Centre for International Justice (current)

International Advisory Committee, Kathmandu School of Law (current)

Foreign Expert, School of Law of the Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan (current)

Law Council of Australia, National Human Rights Committee 

NSW Legal Aid Commission, Human Rights Committee

President, Refugee Advice & Casework Service

Vice-President, Sydney PEN

Editorial or Advisory Board Member, Transnational Criminal Law Review, Indonesian Journal of International Law, South Asian Studies in International and Comparative Law, Kathmandu School of Law Review, International Law and International Organizations (current)

Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) (current)

Associate Fellow of the International Centre for Counter-terrorism in The Hague (current)

Member, Australian New Zealand Society of International Law (current)

Australian Research Council Future Fellow

Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for International Law (Germany)

Visiting Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights (Sweden)

Certificate of Merit from the American Society of International Law

Peter Lyon Memorial Prize, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs

Honorary Academic Fellow, St Paul’s College, University of Sydney

1. Ben Saul, ‘From Conflict to Complementarity: Reconciling International Counter-Terrorism Law and International Humanitarian Law’ (2021) 103 International Review of the Red Cross 157

2. Ben Saul and Dapo Akande (eds), The Oxford Guide to International Humanitarian Law (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020)

3. Ben Saul (ed), Research Handbook on International Law and Terrorism (2nd edition, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2020) 

4. Simon Chesterman and Ben Saul (eds), Oxford Handbook on International Law in Asia (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019)

5. Ben Saul, David Kinley and Jacqueline Mowbray, The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Commentary, Cases and Materials (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014)