Dr. Yassin El-Ayouty, Esq.
A Biographical Note
January, 1 2009

Born in Egypt and later naturalized as a United States Citizen, Dr. Yassin El-Ayouty, Esq. is founder and president of SUNSGLOW-Global Training in the Rule of Law since 1999. This private corporation with a public service purpose is devoted to transnational judicial and legal training and exchange of experiences especially in the developing world. It is assisted by a distinguished Board of Advisors, a corps of volunteers (Associates) from several countries, and 10 regional liaison centers around the world, whose names appear on this stationery. The SUNSGLOW Associates are largely drawn from the ranks of internships organized by SUNSGLOW for St. Francis College, New York City, as well as other meritorious candidates. SUNSGLOW sums up its cause in its motto – Training for Legal and Judicial Reform, Respect for Human Rights, and the Enhancement of Good Governance across National Borders, Time Zones and Language Barriers. On December 15, 2008, SUNSGLOW celebrated its 10th Anniversary at Fordham University School of Law. The Theme of that event was “Anti-Terrorism and the Law”.

Prior to his departure in 1952 from Egypt on a Fulbright scholarship in the U.S.A., he taught modern history of Egypt at the Model School in Cairo, Egypt (1948-1952). He accomplished his teaching through innovative educational methods: plays and songs which he wrote in Arabic for the enactment of his students on stages in local communities.

He served the UN from 1954 to 1986 including being UN spokesman during the Algerian war of independence, and later became Principal Officer in his capacity as Chief of the Africa Division, and Secretary of the U.N. Council for Namibia, Department of Political Affairs and Decolonization. In 1964, he drafted the statute of the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), promulgated by the U.N. General Assembly in 1965 at the U.N.’s 20th Anniversary, and later became UNITAR’s director of training.

In 1956, he served as a research assistant to Polish Professor Raphael Lemkin, of Yale University, who is considered the father of the global campaign for state accession to the Genocide Convention. And in 1971, in accordance with a resolution of the U.N. General Assembly, Dr. El-Ayouty established the first U.N. Peace Research Unit within the then Department of Political and Security Council Affairs (1971-1973).

Since 1995, he is Special Counsel to the New York City law firm of Spector & Feldman, where he has been handling mainly transjurisdictional and other international cases. These include cases before the UN Security Council Committees on sanctions, immigration and U.S. national security cases, and various U.S. and European corporations, cases.

Prior to that, and for several years, Dr. El-Ayouty was editor of the Arabic edition of Forbes magazine, New York City, and international consultant to Forbes, Inc.

He is a member of several bars including the New Jersey Bar, the Bar of the US Supreme Court, the Egyptian Bar, the Bar of the Egyptian Court of Cassassion (the Supreme Court of Egypt), the Federation of the Arab Bar Associations, and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. He is also an Arbitrator with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, New York City.

Dr El-Ayouty is a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs Cairo, Egypt – a non-governmental organization (NGO) which Dr. El-Ayouty represents at the UN, as an affiliate of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

After visiting war-torn Iraq in 2007 and 2008, he became pro bono legal advisor to the Childhood Care & Sponsorship Organization (CCSO) in Iraq, a non-governmental, charitable entity whose past president, and now honorary president, is Ms. Hind Al-Shnayen who served as senior advisor on the Governing Council (the Provisional Executive) of Iraq after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein, in 2003.

Dr. El-Ayouty was an adjunct professor of political science at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of St. John’s University, New York City (1966-1972) where he, in 1967, drafted the terms of reference of the Papal Fellowships designed for U.N. diplomats and their spouses in honor of the visit of His Holiness Pope Paul VI to the U.S. He also served as adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1972-1997) where he is now professor emeritus. From 1996 to 2000, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Nova Southeastern University, the Shepard Broad Law School, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Simultaneously, he was an adjunct professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York City (1996-2004). Since 2001, he is an adjunct professor of law at the Cairo University School of Law, Cairo, Egypt. He is a Fellow at the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, Fordham University School of Law, New York City, where he is also an adjunct professor of Islamic Law.

As of 1997, Dr. El-Ayouty has been adjunct professor at St. Francis College, New York City, where he, within the Department of International Cultural Studies, has developed an international and municipal internship program for highly meritorious undergraduate students. These interns are primarily SUNSGLOW interns. But they combine their internships (which cover both the seminar type academic with the practical) with brief externship interludes at the U.N., U.N. Specialized Agencies and New York City Agencies.

He specializes in legal and judicial reform, diplomatic and consular immunities; international sanctions; international criminal law; international humanitarian law; terrorism and the law, the UN Security Council sanctions regimes, anti-corruption, and Islamic jurisprudence. Since an early retirement from the UN in 1986, he continued to serve the UN Security Council as an ad hoc consultant in his fields of expertise. In November 2006, the UN Secretary-General, in consultation with the Security Council, appointed Dr. El-Ayouty to the Panel of Experts on Darfur, the Sudan. He served in Darfur until February 2007, and submitted his independent report on the legal and tribal ramifications of that conflict.

Later in 2007, he turned his attention to another conflict – the Iraqi war – in connection with which he went repeatedly to Baghdad as of March 2007 on a case calling for due process for an Associated Press photojournalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Bilal Hussein Zeydan, who was detained by the US military in Iraq. Joining hands with Paul G. Gardephe, Esq., of Patterson Belknap Webb and Tyler, New York City, (nominated by President Bush in late April 2008 for a federal judgeship for the Southern District of New York), Bilal, following two years of detention, was released in April 2008 and rejoined the service of the Associated Press. Also in 2007, he was appointed by Senior US District Court Judge Frederic Block of the Eastern District of New York, as Special Master to settle the claims of the Egyptian families of the Egyptair crash off the US eastern coast in 1999 – a task which he performed at Egypt’s highest court (the Court of Cassassion) in 2007.

With reference to selected civic, inter-cultural and interfaith activities, Dr. El-Ayouty is an honorary member of Temple Emmanuel of Great Neck, New York, and is a member of the Board of the Sophia Center of the Huntington, New York, Seminary. In both 1998 and 2008, the New York city Department of Investigation (DOI), recognized Dr. El-Ayouty’s services on behalf of the Rule of Law, by special citations. Dr. El-Ayouty is also closely associated with the programs of the World Justice Project of the American Bar Association.

Dr. El-Ayouty has a diploma in educational psychology from the Teachers Institute, Cairo, Egypt (1948); another B.S. in education from the State Teachers College, Trenton, New Jersey (1953); an M.A. in U.S. Constitutional History from Rutgers University, New Jersey; a Ph.D. from New York University (NYU) in international law and international organization (1966); and a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (1994).

In addition to his Fulbright Scholarship in the U.S. (1952-1954), Dr. El-Ayouty was the recipient of the following honors: the Louis Bevier Scholarship in the Social Sciences from Rutgers University, New Jersey; the Founder’s Day Award for his Ph.D. work at New York University; and of the Faculty Award for the “Best Independent/Supervised” legal writing from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, class of 1994. Dr. El-Ayouty was included by the American Bar Association’s the World Justice Forum among its guests in Prague, the Czech Republic in 2007, and in 2008 to Vienna, Austria, for consideration of the Rule of Law in a globalized world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

Dr. El-Ayouty works in Arabic, English, and French; has a working knowledge of Spanish; and is presently working on adding Persian to his linguistic roster. He has three “dormant” languages (previously learnt but not used), namely, German, Latin and Hebrew.

He is the author and editor of several articles, professional studies (e.g. The Judiciary of the Republic of Yemen: A Study in Reform (The World Bank, 2001); The Darfur Crisis: Legal, Political and Tribal Perspectives (for the United Nations Security Council Committee on the Sudan, March 2007) and so far of nine books. The two most recent of these books are entitled Government Ethics and Law Enforcement (Greenwood Press, 2000, with a foreword by the then Mayor of New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani), and Perspectives on 9/11 (Greenwood Press, 2004). At present he is working on a book to be entitled Islam and Global Security: The Convergence of Islamic Law and US Laws. Simultaneously, he is planning with, Paul G. Gardephe of the Southern District of New York, to work on a book on the case of the Iraqi photojournalist mentioned above, to be entitled, when published, Unusual Access: The U.S. War on Iraqi Journalists (Potomac Books, Inc.). His first publication was a novel in Arabic which was published in Cairo in 1948 under the title of Dajjal Fi Qaria (Witchcraft in the Village).

At Fordham University School of Law, Dr. El-Ayouty, aside from his course on Islamic Law, is assisting the school’s Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s work in developing a regular program of symposia intended to enhance the interaction between modern Islamic scholarship and the U.S., with a view to the reestablishment of peace and understanding between America and the world of Islam.

In the context of SUNSGLOW, and with the help of the Iraqi judiciary and the Iraqi Bar, as well as of SUNSGLOW’s Iraqi Associates, Dr. El-Ayouty is launching several programs for post-Saddam Iraq. These include legal education for the masses (People and the Law) – a program similar to “Court TV” in the US. It is to be noted here that Dr. El-Ayouty’s tenure at the UN included the post of Principal Officer for Radio and TV, Department of Public Information, (1983-1986). In fact his U.N. career began with his assignment in 1954 to the Arabic Language Radio Service. This was followed by his promotion to Chief of that Service in New York and Geneva, Switzerland, from which locations he made daily shortwave broadcasts to the Arab world for which he later initiated and produced a weekly television Arabic program.

Other SUNSGLOW activities for Iraq focus on reciprocal exchanges between the Iraqi judiciary and other national judiciaries for the purpose of bolstering the newly-established Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council, presently headed by the Hon. Judge Medhat Al-Mahmood.

Dr. El-Ayouty is married to Grace Lasser El-Ayouty and, together, they have a son – Joseph El-Ayouty.

His email address is info@sunsglow.com.