‘The world is facing incredible challenges — lawyers should be part of the solution’

After nearly 25 years in London, the American-born lawyer Mark Ellis has — thanks to his teenage son — learnt the rules of rugby and almost got to grips with cricket.
Ellis, who since 2000 has been executive director of the International Bar Association (IBA), was this month made a fellow of King’s College London in recognition of his contribution to international criminal law; upholding the principles of justice, human rights and global peace; and seeking accountability for those responsible for violating them.
Before taking over the reigns of the IBA — the world’s biggest legal profession lobbying group, which was founded in New York in 1947 — Ellis led the American Bar Association’s assistance programme to the former Soviet bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the most extensive international pro bono legal programme ever undertaken by US lawyers.
During his career Ellis, 67, has served as legal adviser to the Independent International Commission on Kosovo and on the creation of Serbia’s War Crimes Tribunal.
With the support of the British Foreign Office, he created a training programme for the lawyers and judges in the Iraqi High Tribunal that tried Saddam Hussein and acted as legal consultant to the defence team at the Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal.
Despite all the evidence of man’s inhumanity to man that he has witnessed, Ellis remains positive that the world can be made a better and safer place — and one that is anchored to the rule of law. And all lawyers, whatever their specialism, he stresses, have a responsibility to play their part in upholding and promoting the rule of law.
Acknowledging his idealism, Ellis calls on the legal profession to “step up and be part of finding solutions” to the “incredible challenges facing the world”, adding that he will “always keep looking towards the legal profession to do that”.
Lawyers, he argues, have “shown up time and time again” in circumstances where the rule of law has been threatened. He cites the American legal profession’s effort in the face of Donald Trump’s “atrocious” curtailing of arrivals from mostly Muslim countries near the beginning of his presidency.
“Law firms sent out lawyers to airports to ensure that if somebody came into the United States, they would have somebody there to represent them,” he recalls with pride.
Ellis is currently advising the International Criminal Court on sanctions — but since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 his focus has been on leading the IBA’s assistance programme there, visiting the country six times and speaking out against President Putin’s aggression.
In 2015 Ellis and the IBA launched an app called “eyeWitness to Atrocities”, which captures photographic evidence of potential war crimes to be used in any prosecutions in court. It has been used extensively during the war in Ukraine, as well as in conflict areas around the globe, says Ellis.
Standing up to Russian aggression, insists Ellis, is important not just for Ukraine, but for the international community as a whole.
In the face of dictators and warmongers, Ellis insists that the international community has stepped up its awareness and commitment to justice and done a great deal to ensure that perpetrators are accountable — from the creation of ad hoc tribunals to the International Criminal Court.
But, he says, the success of those bodies is significantly determined by politics. “It’s not the fault of the system or mechanisms that we’ve created — each of them needs the political willingness to be effective, and that’s where we often fall short.”
More widely, Ellis is concerned by the replacement of liberalism with the rise of populism, nationalism and xenophobia across various jurisdictions. The issue now, he stresses, is to “get back to a civilised position”.
Born in Washington DC in 1957, Ellis has an identical twin brother, Scott, who is an actor and stage and film director. His mother was a teacher and his father was a trial lawyer, in whose steps he thought he would follow after watching him in court as a child.
Ellis studied economics then law at Florida State University, in Tallahassee, which he quips was “not the hotbed of international law”. His first taste of international work came in a summer programme in Brussels and the then-Yugoslavia during law school.
As a newly-qualified lawyer, Ellis’s first case involved the successful representation of a funeral home director — in addition to thanking the young lawyer, his client offered to refer work from a network of colleagues that needed help.
To escape a career as “a lawyer for funeral home directors” Ellis applied for and won a Fulbright scholarship at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, Croatia.
Two experiences had a “transformative” effect on his life, moving his career into international criminal law. The first was on a lecturing visit to East Berlin in 1989 that coincided with the fall of the wall.
“I remember realising that nobody has any interest in what I’m saying, because everybody knew something was dramatically happening,” says Ellis, who paid $10 for the cap of one of the East German border guards whose job had been to patrol the no-man’s land between the two sides.
The second involved seeing the site of a mass grave in Sarajevo one morning towards the end of the Balkans conflict.
Moving to London, Ellis thought he would lead the IBA for five years. Nearly a quarter of a century later he is still in post, having become a British citizen.
Living near Regent’s Park in London, Ellis enjoys being able to walk in the city, and out of town his pastimes include hiking, cycling and golf. But his real love is fly fishing.
“I like it because I can completely disconnect. I’m focused on what fly is right to catch the fish and where I need to be in the stream to cast my line — nothing else comes to my mind.”