The ICJ announced has appointed the highly respected international human rights lawyer, Wilder Tayler, as its new Deputy Secretary-General.
Senior lawyer Federico Andreu-Guzmán, was appointed to the new position of General Counsel. The two appointments significantly strengthen the senior management of the ICJ as it continues a process of expanding and intensifying its work around the world.
Wilder Tayler will bring to the position of ICJ Deputy Secretary-General more than twenty years of senior legal, advocacy and organizational experience. He has just completed ten years as Legal and Policy Director at Human Rights Watch, where as a senior manager he helped to guide the strategic direction of the organization during a period of major growth and development. During six-and-a-half years at Amnesty International (1990-1997), Wilder Tayler held positions as Programme Director for the Americas Programme, Legal Adviser for the Americas and Legal Adviser for Asia-Pacific.
In the 1980s, Wilder Tayler fought against impunity for perpetrators of human rights violations during the dictatorship in his own country, Uruguay, as Legal Officer and board member of the ICJ-affiliate, Instituto de Estudios Legales y Sociales del Uruguay (Institute for Legal and Social Studies), and then as its Executive Director from 1987 to 1990.
Wilder Tayler is also an elected member of the newly established United Nations (UN) Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Torture and is a member of the boards of the International Council for Human Rights Policy and INTERIGHTS. He holds a Doctorate in law from the University of Uruguay and carried out further studies in Germany and France.
As ICJ General Counsel (at the level of Deputy Secretary-General), Federico Andreu-Guzmán will draw on more than twenty years of legal and on-the-ground experience in Latin America, Africa and Europe. Among other duties, he will strengthen the analysis and development of ICJ’s legal policies.
Federico Andreu-Guzmán, who is currently ICJ Deputy Secretary-General, joined the ICJ in 2000 after three years as Legal Adviser for the Americas at Amnesty International. Federico Andreu-Guzmán is well known for his ground-breaking work in his native Colombia between 1984 and 1991, where among other positions, he was in charge of national investigations for the ICJ-affiliate, the Colombian Commission of Jurists.
After moving to Belgium in 1991, Federico Andreu-Guzmán consulted for the Belgium-based Nationaal Centrum voor Ontwikkelingssamenwerking (National Center for Development Cooperation). He worked for UN human rights field operations, in Rwanda in 1996-97 and in a joint UN-Organization of American States operation in Haiti in 1994.
From 1995, he held the positions of Director of the Oficina Internacional de Derechos Humanos Acción Colombia (Human Rights International Office – Colombia Action) and Deputy Secretary-General for Latin America for the Fédération Internationale des ligues des Droits de l’Homme (International Federation for Human Rights).
Wilder Tayler and Federico Andreu-Guzmán are well known around the world for their long-standing commitment to human rights. Both played a leading role over many years in the drafting of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 20 December 2006.
Wilder Tayler will take up his position at the ICJ in early April, at which time the appointment of Federico Andreu-Guzmán will also take effect.
