François Roux brings an eminent track record as a defence lawyer in the field of international justice to his position as the Head of the Defence Office.
Mr Roux, a French citizen, has been an attorney for 38 years and is influenced by the life and thinking of Mahatma Gandhi who was also a lawyer.
Since the late 1970s he has defended Polynesian and Kanak (New Caledonia) separatists in the French Pacific Territories. In that capacity he was involved in the peace agreements between the Kanak Liberation Movement and the French government which resulted in the 1988 Matignon Agreements and the 1998 Nouméa Accord. In 1994 he was also counsel for the Tuareg rebels during the peace agreements with the government of Niger.
Since 1999 Mr Roux has acted on behalf of defendants before various international criminal jurisdictions including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and has assisted suspects before the International Criminal Court, and appeared before the extraordinary chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the Duch trial).
Mr Roux was a consultant to the American defence team assigned to Zacarias Moussaoui following the September 11 2001 attacks. With his American colleague Gerald Zerkin he participated in the case against the death penalty.
Closer to home he has defended José Bové, an anti-globalization farmer and trade unionist, in France against the fast-food company McDonalds, the Syndicat Confédération Paysanne, and the movement of volunteer reapers of GMOs, a group of citizens who use civil disobedience to oppose genetically modified organisms.
He has acted in various cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva.
He is a Knight in the National Order of Merit and Knight of the Legion of Honour.
Mr Roux has written numerous articles on human rights in major French newspapers, including Le Monde and Libération. He was the head of a French law firm in south of France (Montpellier) which specializes in criminal law, international relations, law of persons, public law, mediation and human rights.
His motto is it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
You can download a high-resolution photograph of François Roux from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon's Flickr account.