Diego García Sayán

Diego García-Sayán Larrabure (born in Brooklyn, New York on 2 August 1950), is a former Justice and Foreign Affairs Minister of Perú, and currently a judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.^[1]

In 2007, he was unanimously elected, by his peers at the Court, to serve as the Court's Vice President for the 2008–09 period and, on 25 November 2009, to be its President for the 2010-12 period.^[2]

Judge García Sayán is the youngest son of Dr. Enrique García-Sayán, a former Foreign Affairs Minister of Perú who, in 1946, was the person most associated along with President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, for launching the so called "200 Nautical Miles (370.4 km) Territorial Doctrine", currently being adhered to and claimed by Benin, Congo, Ecuador, El Salvador, Liberia, Perú and Somalia.

After the 1948 coup d´état which overthrew the constitutionally elected Government of President Bustamante, Dr. García-Sayán went into exile, working with the United Nations first in New York, then in Geneva, which led a year later to his son Diego's birth in the United States.

Professional Activities

García Sayán co-founded the Peruvian Center for International Studies (CEPEI) in 1980. He is also the Chairperson of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.^[3] In the Peruvian government he has served as a member of Congress (2000) and, as noted earlier, has held the portfolios of Minister of Justice, (2000–2001) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (2001–2002).^[2]

Education

García Sayán attended the "Santa Maria" School, graduating from high-school in 1967. He then attended the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, graduating with a Bachelor's degree in 1969. He continued his studies at the University of Texas, at Austin in 1970, and returned to the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru for his law degree in 1975, where he has, since then, also taught law.

On his spare time, Mr. García Sayán is a percussionist and motorcycle enthusiast, the former from his times as a teenager, when he and several of his school friends formed the rock group Los Hang Ten's.

References

External links

• Judge Diego García Sayán, Inter-American Court
• ICHR orders abolition of mandatory death sentence
• Human rights court decision handed down in Barbados case
• Globalization and the struggle against discrimination and exclusion, a statement by Diego García Sayán
• Diego García-Sayan: Latin America needs to deal with its human rights past in a court of law