Partner

mmarcus@marcusandroberts.com

Overview

As a founding partner of M&R, Ms. Marcus centers her practice on providing respectful support to local practitioners seeking accountability for international crimes in their own country’s courts.

Biography

Maxine Marcus is an international criminal prosecutor and investigator with 23 years’ field based and courtroom based experience in international criminal law. Her field work includes Chad (for Darfur), Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Hungary, Kosovo, Ingushetia/Chechnya, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia (Gambella), Guinea, Kenya, the Phillippines, and Guatemala. She served for nine years as a prosecuting attorney at the ICTY on four cases including the Mladic Case. From 2003 to 2005 Ms. Marcus served as investigating attorney for the Civil Defence Forces prosecution team in the Special Court for Sierra Leone. In November and December 2009 Ms. Marcus served on the UN Commission of Inquiry for Guinea as the Gender and International Criminal Law Adviser, and from April to June 2014 she served as Senior International Criminal Law and Gender Adviser to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office on their Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative, and as Senior International Criminal Law Advisor to the UK Protocol on Documentation of Sexual Violence in Conflict. From December 2014 to March 2015 Ms. Marcus was senior SGBV advisor to the OHCHR Fact Finding Mission for Sri Lanka, and from July to December 2015 she served as Senior Legal Investigator to the UN Secretary General’s External Panel on Sexual Abuse by International Forces in the Central African Republic.

Ms. Marcus is a long time faculty member of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations and Justice Rapid Response.

Expertise

  • International criminal law and customary international law, torture, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, conflict-related sexual violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, cold cases.
  • International criminal investigations, complex criminal investigations.
  • Evidence diagnostics for mass criminal cases.  
  • Proof of grave crimes in the absence of forensic evidence.
  • Litigation: Special Court for Sierra Leone and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. 

accolades

  • Honoree on the Gender Justice Legacy Wall at the ICC
  • 2018 recipient of the Prominent Women in International Law Award by the American Society of International Law.

Education

  • Brooklyn Law School, J.D., 2001
  • Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Master of International Affairs, Human Rights, 1995
  • Barnard College, Columbia University, B.A. Political Science, French, 1992

Admissions

  • NY State Bar

Languages

  • English: Native Fluency (mother tongue)
  • Spanish, Professional Proficiency
  • French, Professional Proficiency
  • Dutch, Intermediate Proficiency
  • Hungarian, Intermediate Proficiency
  • Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, Conversational

Selected Publications