Honour for Professor Colin Warbrick

I am delighted to note that Professor Colin Warbrick, Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham and longtime Professor of International Law at the University of Durham has been appointed in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list as “Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George” (see here). So from now he is Professor Colin Warbrick CMG.

For all who know Colin and who know his work, this appointment will immediately be recognised as a well deserved honour. Awards in the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George are for service rendered internationally or in a foreign country and in Colin’s case, he is appointed CMG “for services to international law”. Those services to international law are indeed considerable. He has written on a wide range of areas of international law with some of his best known and most influential work dealing with issues of statehood and recognition, the application of international law in domestic law, and human rights law. He is a co-author of Harris, O’Boyle and Warbrick, The Law of the European Convention on Human Rights (OUP) now in its 3rd edition. For many years he was editor of the “Current Developments: Public International Law” section of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, contributing many insightful pieces himself to that section.  He is also a member of the editorial committee of the British Yearbook of International Law and has had joint responsibility for the “United Kingdom Materials on International Law 2013” section of the Yearbook for quite some years. In those roles in the ICLQ and the BYIL Colin has done more than most to bring to light the reality of how international law works and develops, as well as to subject the big issues of the day to powerful international legal analysis. In addition to his scholarship, Colin has also acted as a consultant to international organizations like the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and was a specialist adviser to the Select Committee on the Constitution of the House of Lords.

Colin was for most of his career a teacher and scholar of international law based at the University of Durham, moving to Birmingham for a few years before he “retired” some years ago. I was for four years a Lecturer in international law at the University of Durham when Colin was Professor there and head of Department. One could not have hoped for a better and more supportive senior colleague. We taught an undergraduate and a postgraduate public international law class together and when I arrived, he said to me “you choose the bits you wish to teach, and I will do the rest”.