Agwu Ukiwe Okali
Agwu Ukiwe Okali, LL.B (Lond., LSE), LL.M, SJD (Harvard), Attorney-at-Law, Member, Connecticut (USA) State Bar.
Dr. Okali is the Founder-Chairman of the Society for the Elimination of Racism in All Language (SERIAL), and author of the SERIAL ‘Manifesto’ book, OF BLACK SERVITUDE WITHOUT SLAVERY: The Unspoken Politics of the English Language.
Dr. Okali was born in Nigeria and attended King’s College, Lagos, at the pre-University level. He earned his Bachelor’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science, during which time he was selected to represent the LSE at the National Law Moot Court competition for England and Wales. Dr. Okali undertook his graduate studies at the Harvard Law School (USA), where his doctoral thesis was supervised by the renowned jurist, Professor Lon L. Fuller.
After a stint as a corporate lawyer in the US private sector, Dr. Okali had a distinguished career at the United Nations, serving in various capacities, including as Legal Officer at UN Headquarters, NY, Secretary of the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements and later as Deputy Executive Head of UNHABITAT. Dr. Okali’s last UN appointment, prior to taking early retirement to pursue other personal interests, was as Registrar (Head of Office) of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UNICTR), with the rank of United Nations Assistant Secretary-General. Among Dr. Okali’s achievements in UN service was his pioneering restitutive/restorative justice idea that mandates integrating assistance to victims, through Special Trust Fund mechanisms, into the conventional “retributive” approach of punishing the culprit in criminal justice systems. This idea was incorporated into the set-up of the permanent International Criminal Court in 1998. Dr. Okali is also proud to have authored a key strategy paper that assisted African leaders in the successful campaign to elect the first African UN Secretary-General, in 1991, and ushered in the idea of “equitable rotation” that has influenced selection to the Office ever since.
Dr. Okali is also Founder-Chairman of The Okali Seminal Ideas Foundation for Africa (OSIFA) www.osifa.org, a non-profit Foundation dedicated to fostering and facilitating a more effective participation of Africa in the world of ideas, thereby ending the continent’s “ideas-dependency” condition.