Mr. O-Gon Kwon is an attorney-at-law at Kim & Chang who serves as the President of the firm’s International Law Institute. His general litigation practice includes international and cross-border litigation as well as outbound practice.

Kwon is also serving as the chair of the Advisory Committee for Judicial Policy of the Supreme Court of Korea and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Constitutional Court of Korea. Additionally, Kwon has been serving as a member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press) since 2007.

Before joining Kim & Chang in May 2016, Kwon worked as one of the permanent judges of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from November 2001 to March 2016. He served as the Vice-President of the ICTY from 2008 to 2011. During his mandate at the ICTY, Kwon presided over the trial of a former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžić. Previously, he sat on the trial of Slobodan Milošević, a former President of the Republic of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and on the trial of Popović and others, in which seven Bosnian Serbs were accused of involvement in crimes following the July 1995 fall of the Srebrenica enclave.

Kwon was elected as the President of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in December 2017, and served in that post for about three years until February 2021. The ASP is the management oversight and legislative body of the ICC. Kwon also served as the President of the Korean Society of Law, which is the association of all jurists, i.e., judges, prosecutors, attorneys, and law professors in Korea from 2017 to 2022.

Prior to his international career, Kwon served in the judiciary of the Republic of Korea for 22 years as a judge in numerous courts, including the Seoul District Court, Changwon District Court, Suwon District Court, and Taegu High Court. He also served as the Assistant Legal Advisor to the President of the Republic of Korea (1981-1984), the Planning Director at the Office of the Court Administration of the Supreme Court of Korea (1990-1992), and the Director of Research at the Constitutional Court of Korea (1997-1999).

Kwon holds an LL.B. (1976) from Seoul National University College of Law and an LL.M. (1983) from the Graduate School of Seoul National University. He took his bar apprenticeship in the Judicial Research and Training Institute at the Supreme Court of Korea (1979). He also holds an LL.M. (1985) from Harvard Law School, USA.

Kwon received a Moran Medal, Order of Civil Merit, from the President of the Republic of Korea in September 2008. He also received the Korean Legal Culture Award from the Korean Bar Association in 2013 and the Youngsan Legal Culture Award from the Youngsan Foundation of Law & Culture in 2011. Furthermore, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Asialaw in 2017, and Kyung-Ahm Special Prize in 2018. He was also awarded the Lawyer of the Year by the Legal Press Club in 2009.