
Partner
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
- Kathy Roberts and Marcus, Prosecuting Forced Marriage as a Form of Sexual Violence, summary and comment on the prosecution of forced marriage in Case 002/02 at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, in [Un]Forgotten: Annual report on the prosecution of sexual violence as an international crime 2019, TRIAL, April 30, 2019.
- Marcus, “Positive (and Practical) Complementarity: Practical Tools for Peer Prosecutors and Investigators Bringing Atrocity Crimes Cases in National Jurisdictions”, International Criminal Investigations: Law and Practice, Eleven International Publishing, 14 December 2017 | 1st edition | 342 pp., ISBN 978-94-6236-779-1, EISBN 978-94-6274-749-4.
- Marcus, Louise Chappell & Andrea Durbach (2017): ‘Nothing About Us, Without Us, Is For Us’: Victims And The International Criminal Justice System,” The International Journal of Human Rights, DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2017.1361605
- Marcus, Investigation of Crimes of Sexual Violence Under International Criminal Law in Prosecuting Sexual Violence as International Crime: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Series on Transitional Justice (Intersentia), January 2013.
- Evan Wallach and Marcus, Chapter on Command Responsibility, International Criminal Law Case Book, Third Edition, Volume III, International Enforcement, M. Cherif Bassiouni, ed. 2008.
- Marcus. “Post Conflict Justice in Chechnya,” in Post Conflict Justice, M. Cherif Bassiouni, ed. November 2002.
- Marcus, “Humanitarian Intervention Without Borders: Belligerent Occupation or Colonization?” in Houston Journal of International Law, November 2002.