Gavin Hood has more than 13 years of front-line experience as a senior legal and policy adviser.
Since 2009, he has been based in Washington DC, as the first UK legal adviser to the British Embassy. In this capacity, he advises on international legal and policy issues relevant to the UK-US relationship, focusing heavily on the national security sphere. He has held a variety of positions throughout his career with the UK Foreign Office, including as the first legal adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003.
Gavin began his career as a UK Barrister with 18 Red Lion Court, leaving traditional practice to take up a position in Bosnia and Herzegovina working on justice and refugee issues. In 1999, he joined the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo, where he monitored and reported on human rights violations and contributed to the development of the justice system and strategies for tackling ethnic-based violence. His experience in the Balkans led him to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where he assisted in the investigation of, among others, Slobodan Milosevic. In 2003 he became a senior policy adviser to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, where he was instrumental in building the Office of the Prosecutor from its inception and played a major role in advancing the investigations and prosecutions in Northern Uganda, Darfur, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Immediately before taking up his current position in Washington, he spent time at Yale University, as a member of the 2008 Yale World Fellows.
