Yuji Iwasawa
Yuji Iwasawa is a Japanese jurist. He has been a member of the International Court of Justice since 22 June 2018, following the resignation of Judge Hisashi Owada. Before he was elected a judge, he was a professor of international law at the University of Tokyo. He was re-elected on 12 November 2020. He formerly chaired the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
On 3 March 2025 he was elected President of the International Court of Justice, succeeding Nawaf Salam, who had resigned to become Lebanon's prime minister.
Education and career
Iwasawa was born in Tokyo in 1954. After graduating from Kunitachi High School, he matriculated at the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tokyo in 1973. He went on to specialise in public law at the university's [Graduate Schools for Law and Politics and Graduate Schools for Law and Politics and Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo|Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo|Faculty of Law] and graduated with an LL.B. in 1977. He later attended Harvard Law School in America, where he earned an LL.M. degree.From 1982 to 1996, Iwasawa taught at Osaka Metropolitan University as an Associate Professor — for which he would later receive an honorary doctorate from OMU in 2018. Subsequently, he attended the University of Virginia School of Law in America, where he completed an S.J.D. degree in 1997. From 1991 to 1993, he taught at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, part of the University of Cambridge. In 1996, he became an assistant professor at UTokyo, while intermittently spending a few years at the Lauterpacht Centre again. He was appointed Professor of International Law at UTokyo's Faculty of Law in 2005 and remained in that role until 2018.
In 2018, following the resignation of ICJ Judge Hisashi Owada, also Japanese, he ran in the judicial election and was elected. He was re-elected in 2020 and is expected to serve as a judge until 2030. On 3 March 2025, Iwasawa was elected President of the ICJ following the resignation of Nawaf Salam. He is the second Japanese national and UTokyo alumnus to hold the position, after Owada.