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Born in Curacao (1955), Dr. Rutsel Silvestre Jacinto Martha, a Dutch national, is the General Counsel and Director of Legal Affairs of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)[1] (Rome, Italy) since 2008. He was the Minister of Justice of the Netherlands Antilles (1998-2002) and Minister Plenipotentiary in the Netherlands Permanent Representation to the European Union (1990-1998). He also worked as Counsellor in the Legal Department of the International Monetary Fund (Washington, D.C) and, prior to this, as Legal Advisor of the Central Bank of the Netherlands Antilles (Curacao, NA).
Dr Martha is an Adjunct Professor of Law and the New York University, in which capacity he has been a Visiting Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore since 2007 in the NYU@NUS program. In the past he was also an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Washington College of Law of the American University in Washington (1988-1989). From 1983 to 1986 he was a lecturer in law at the University of the Netherlands Antilles.
His areas of expertise include public international law, public international finance, international law enforcement cooperation, international monetary and economic law, international taxation, and European Union Law. His current transactional and advisory practice concentrates on multilateral development finance and international institutional law. In his current capacity is responsible for the legal engineering of the replenishment of the resources of IFAD and the co-financing structures with member States. In the past he was involved in the distribution of the assets and liabilities of the Central Bank of the Netherlands upon the departure of Aruba from the Netherlands Antilles and was the Secretary to the Gold Fund of the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. He also represented the Netherlands Antilles in a GATT-litigation and before the European Court of Justice. He is currently handling cases on behalf of IFAD before the International Labour Organization Administrative Tribunal, at the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Court of Justice on behalf of the IFAD.
He studied law at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands) where he concentrated on public international law and organization. Thereafter, he obtained the degree of Master of Laws in International Legal Studies at the Washington College of Law of the American University where he concentrated on international banking and finance. He obtained the degree of Doctor of Laws (PhD) at the University of Leiden on a thesis concerning the taxation and public international law.
Dr. Martha is the recipient of the 1989 which was awarded the 1989 Mitchell B. Carroll Prize of the International Fiscal Association. In 2004 he was appointed Officer in the Royal Order of Orange of the Netherlands.
He has published extensively on international law, both in Dutch and in English, including three law books:
The Legal Foundations of INTERPOL (Hart Publishing, 2010)[2], Tax Treatment of International Civil Servants (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2009), and, The Jurisdiction to Tax in International Law (Kluwer, 1989).
He wrote many law review articles and book chapters, including: Challenging Acts of INTERPOL in Domestic Courts (In: Challenging Acts of International Organizations Before National Courts, Edited by August Reinisch, OUP, September 2010), Mandate Issues in the International Fund for Agricultural Development (In: International Organizations Law Review; 2009), International Organizations and the Global Financial Crisis: The status of their Assets in Insolvency and Forced Liquidation Proceedings (In: International Organizations Law Review; 2009), Effects of Self-Government and Supra-Nationalism in the International Monetary Fund: the Case of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (In: Manchester Journal of International Economic Law; 2005), Capacity to Sue and Be Sued under WTO Law (In: World Trade Review; 2004), Presumptions and Burden of Proof in World Trade Law (In: Journal of International Arbitration; 1997), Precedent in world trade law (In: Netherlands international law review; vol. 44:1997), Representation of parties in world trade disputes (In: Journal of world trade; vol. 31:1997), World trade disputes settlement and the exhaustion of local remedies rule (In: Journal of world trade; vol. 30: 1996); Inability to Pay under International Law and under the Fund Agreement (In: Netherlands International Law Review; 1994), The Fund Agreement and the Surrender of Monetary Sovereignty to the European Community (In: Common Market Law Review; 1993), Determining the origin of goods for the purposes of article 133 of the EEC Treaty (In: Leiden journal of international law; vol. 3:1990), Preferred Creditor Status under International Law: The Case of the International Monetary Fund (In: The International and Comparative Law Quarterly; 1990); The Debate on Profound Changes of Circumstances and the Interpretation of Gold Clauses in International Transport Treaties (In: Netherlands International Law Review, vol. 32:1984)