
James Cockayne
The WUN International and Comparative Criminal Justice Network awards its inaugural Fellowship to a rising star in international security.
James Cockayne is the inaugural winner of the University of Sydney-WUN International and Comparative Criminal Justice Network Fellowship. Currently serving as a Senior Associate at the International Peace Institute in New York , a major NGO advising governments and the United Nations on peace and security issues, Cockayne will take up the Fellowship at the University of Sydney in August 2009.
Professor Mark Findlay, from the Faculty of Law’s Institute of Criminology, described Cockayne as “a rising star of the international criminal justice community and someone to watch very closely in the future.”
At the age of just 25, Cockayne was appointed director of the Australian government’s Transnational Crime and Extradition Units, where he led a team that provided the government with advice on international criminal law issues, including responses to the Bali bombings, Australia’s obligations in relation to the International Criminal Court, and legal aspects of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He also negotiated with the US government over its efforts to protect their citizens from the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. Prior to joining the IPI, Cockayne worked on war crimes trials in both East and West Africa, including in the Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda , and in the Defence Office of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
In New York , Cockayne jointly heads up a team investigating multilateral responses to transnational security challenges, including terrorism, organised crime, weapons of mass destruction and biosecurity, as well as conflict prevention, mediation and peacekeeping.
Cockayne, an alumnus of the University of Sydney , says he will use the Fellowship to investigate the role criminal justice plays in the international security system. “War and crime are increasingly intertwined around the world: look at the role of drug trafficking in Afghanistan and Colombia.
“Even in places such as Iraq and the Balkans, ethnic and sectarian militias often function indistinguishably from organised crime groups. And civil wars increasingly involve criminal attacks by government leaders on their own populations, leading to international war crimes charges like those in Darfur.”
About the Fellowship
The University of Sydney-WUN International and Comparative Criminal Justice Network Fellowship is sponsored by the Worldwide Universities Network and the University of Sydney to fund a member of the global international criminal justice community to undertake novel collaborative research as part of the WUN International and Comparative Criminal Justice Network. “The fellowship is the first major collaboration between an Australian law school and prominent universities and research centres in Europe and the US to explore global crime and justice” said Professor Mark Findlay of the University of Sydney ’s Institute of Criminology . The Fellowship will be co-hosted by University of Leeds and the University of Sheffield in 2010.