John Jones was a leader at the Bar in international criminal law who was instrumental in setting up United Nations courts to bring to justice war criminals from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda.
His learning lives on in his textbooks, the most recent — Blackstone’s International Criminal Practice — will be published posthumously later this year. He was not only a prolific scholar, but a barrister whose belief that trials can only be fair when unprepossessing defendants are provided with first-rate advocates led him to volunteer his services — often pro bono — so that justice could be seen to be done. The procedural architecture of international criminal courts owes much to his work in drafting their rules and procedure.
John Jones read PPE at St Edmunds Hall, Oxford, before turning to law at Lincoln’s Inn, with a diploma in law from City university and a master’s at George Washington University in the US capital, where he joined the local Bar. He was immediately attracted to the UN movement to revive the Nuremberg legacy by establishing courts to deal with the conflicts in former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) and the genocide in Rwanda (the ICTR).
These tribunals, although set up by the UN in 1993 and 1994 respectively, did not begin trials for some years: in this fallow period Jones was employed as an assistant to the president, Professor Antonio Cassesse, in drafting its rules of evidence and procedure. Although this paperwork lacked the adrenalin that would come with advocacy, it gave him a sure legal footing when he later came to represent defendants. The work also informed his early textbooks: International Criminal Practice (3rd edition, 2003), The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: A Commentary (with Cassesse) and The Practice of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (2nd edition, 2000). These tomes were necessary for a system of international criminal law that was starting virtually from scratch, with only judgments at the Nuremberg trials, held in very different circumstances, as precedents.
By his early thirties, Jones had become a significant architect of the new international tribunals. In 2003, he set an important precedent when he was appointed as the inaugural head of a new Defence Office in the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone. Its president, Geoffrey Robertson QC, was concerned to balance the power of the international prosecutor, set up on the European model as an “organ” of the court alongside the judges and the registry. The “Defence Office” was meant to counteract this in-built bias, and Jones’s work in obtaining and organising effective representation for defendants and dealing himself with their initial hearings won wide praise. It led to the creation of similar offices in the International Criminal Court and subsequent international tribunals.
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Jones worked in Paris for White & Case, and then began in earnest at the English Bar, first at Charter Chambers and then, in 2005, at Doughty Street Chambers. There, he developed a large practice handling extradition cases, especially ones involving the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) system, introduced in 2003. It was complex and controversial legislation, and barristers were grateful for help from his Extradition and Mutual Assistance Handbook, published by Oxford University Press. Jones acted both for targets of the EAW and for targeting governments: courts complimented him, on several occasions, for his fairness. He withdrew one case because he said, “I think it is right to do so.” He also acted as counsel for the Rwandan government in its controversial (and unsuccessful) attempt to extradite alleged Hutu genocidaires now living in Britain.
He acted pro bono in many cases — perhaps too many for his own good — but he could not bear to see a case lost for want of a lawyer. His general affability must have been strained by delving into the evidence against some of the people he was called upon to defend. In the ICC, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (investigating the assassination of Rafic Hariri, its former prime minister) and in the African Human Rights Court and Commission. He was particularly exercised by the plight of his Libyan clients, Saif Gaddafi and al-Senussi who were (and are still) facing unfair trials and the consequent likelihood of execution in Libya. He argued that the ICC had primary jurisdiction to try them in the Hague, where the death penalty cannot be imposed.
Jones was a member of Julian Assange’s team in applying for bail and resisting extradition. He achieved an unexpected success earlier this year by persuading the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to declare that Assange had been unlawfully detained. This decision was rejected by the UK Government, although the thrust of the tribunal ruling was to condemn Sweden for its prosecution’s failure to act fairly.
Jones acted in many other leading cases, pooling his knowledge of extradition and international law successfully to resist Serbia’s demand to extradite Ejup Ganic, the former president of Bosnia. In the case of “HH”, the mother of three young children whose extradition was sought by Italy, he persuaded the Supreme Court to direct British judges to consider the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child before extraditing their parents. He served for many years as a part-time immigration judge, and in 2011 was appointed to the Attorney-General’s list of counsel.
It was at Oxford that Jones’s extraordinary abilities were first noticed by his chums: a photographic memory for every Blackadder and Monty Python script, which he would perform for their delight. Later, on his legal travels, he had the capacity to learn the language of the countries where he was stationed — Bosnian, Swahili, Sierra Leone Pidgin and even a strange tongue — a clicking language in coastal Africa which he said helped him to talk with Orangutans. He became a trustee of the Orangutan Protection Foundation. He also strove to protect whales and acted in cases brought against Japan.
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Jones married Miša Zgonec-Rožej, a Slovenian international lawyer, who survives him along with their young sons, Patrick and Zachary. He collaborated with his wife on articles in law journals and books on the rights of suspects and procedures at the Lebanon tribunal. On hearing of his death, the court stood in silent tribute after its president intoned, “Today, we are all wearing John Jones’s robes.” An inquest will be held into his death.
A Buddhist ceremony was staged in the war crimes court when the news reached Cambodia. A fund has been established by Doughty Street Chambers to honour his memory.
John Jones, QC, was born on June 14, 1967. He died on April 18, 2016, aged 48