Stephen Rapp is a Senior Fellow at the Oxford University’s Center for Law, Ethics and Armed Conflict, and at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Prevention of Genocide. He serves as Chair of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a Senior Peace Fellow of the Public International Law and Policy Group, and on the boards of Physicians for Human Rights, the IBA Human Rights Institute, the ABA Rule of Law Initiative, and the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights.
Rapp was the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2007 to 2009 where he led the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. During his tenure, his office achieved the first convictions in history for sexual slavery and forced marriage as crimes against humanity, and for attacks on peacekeepers and recruitment and use of child soldiers as violations of international humanitarian law. From 2001 to 2007, he served as Senior Trial Attorney and Chief of Prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he headed the trial team that achieved the first convictions in history of leaders of the mass media for the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide.
Between 2009 and 2014 he was Ambassador-at-Large heading the Office of Global Criminal Justice in the US
State Department. In that position he coordinated US Government support to international criminal tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, as well as to hybrid and national courts responsible for prosecuting persons charged with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.