Biography: Commercial Arbitration

Fathi Kemicha is one of the Arab world's leading international lawyers. He is a member of the Bars of Paris and Tunisia. He has a diploma from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (1977), a Doctor-of-laws from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1984), and was a visiting scholar at Yale Law School (1996).

He has been re-elected by the UN General Assembly to the International Law Commission (ILC) (2007 to 2011); he is also the chair of the World Bank Sanctions Board.

He is a prominent member of the international arbitration community, and has acted as arbitrator and counsel in numerous institutional and ad hoc commercial arbitrations. He is a member of the International Council of Commercial Arbitration (ICCA), the vice president of the commission on arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), and member of Dubai International Arbitration Centre (DIAC) board of trustees and executive committee. He is a former vice president of the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) and a former secretary general of the Arbitration System of the Euro-Arab Chambers of Commerce in Paris.

He has appeared as counsel to the State of Pakistan in the case concerning the aerial incident of 10 August 1999 (Pakistan v India) before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He has also appeared as counsel to the State of Bahrain in the case concerning maritime delimitation and territorial questions between Qatar and Bahrain (Qatar v Bahrain), again before the ICJ.

He has been the founder and first-appointed secretary general of the Constitutional Court of the Kingdom of Bahrain (2003 to 2005).

He speaks Arabic, French and English.