Matthew Parish

Parish left Akin Gump's Geneva office for Holman Fenwick Willan’s (HFW) Geneva office in 2011.. In December 2014 he and a colleague at HFW set up their own practice, Gentium Law Group.. In July 2017 the partner sold his share of the company to Parish and left. In November 2018 he ceased to manage the company having handed control to a new partner. The company was dissolved due to bankruptcy in June 2019..

Parish was detained by the Geneva Prosecutor's Office in May 2018 on allegations by two Russian oil traders, Murat Seitnepesov and Konstantin Ryndin of Integral Petroleum SA, of criminal defamation related to the reporting to western intelligence agencies of violations of sanctions against Iran. He was released and later charged and found guilty of criminal defamation for making the reports to Western intelligence services accusing his former clients, Murat Seitnepesov and Konstantin Ryndin, of money laundering, fraud and financing terrorism. Parish indicated his intention to appeal the conviction.

Parish has published a series of articles expressing sympathy for the 2017 Catalan independence movement and spent several months mandated to study the independence process in Catalonia.

Parish has given evidence to both the European Parliament and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US Congress in 2016 on issues relating to international organizations and international law. He is an advocate of free trade and open-market economics, and says that international investment is a consequence of free trade.

Parish was elected as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum in 2013 and has also been named as one of the 300 most influential people in Switzerland by Bilan Magazine.

Parish spoke to the UN General Assembly in April 2013 in a meeting organized by its then President Vuk Jeremic. He chaired a debate about the effectiveness of international criminal justice, and how it might be made more efficient and improved. Parish was a key supporter of and Chief International Political Advisor to Jeremic in his campaign to become elected UN Secretary General in 2016, and his firm, Gentium Law Group, was reported as a principal supporter Jeremic, who came in second behind António Guterres.

In 2013 and 2018 Parish was named as one of the three hundred most influential people in Switzerland.

Parish's book Mirages of International Justice (2011) advances a constructivist account of international law. He thinks sovereign states would never agree to create genuinely impartial and independent international courts that would enforce international law against themselves. Thus international courts are deliberately made powerless, and they occupy precarious roles in the balance of power in which they are liable to make decisions in accordance with Great Power interests. International tribunals proliferate not because states want to see international justice done but because they want to associate themselves with the ideals captured in discourse about international law without making any real commitments. The world of international relations remains an anarchy, but international courts (and indeed international organizations in general) are part of an illusion that the world is ordered in accordance with moral principles. Nevertheless, Parish is a defender of controversial investment treaty arbitration, a system of international law that allows investors to sue states.

In 2010 Parish wrote a commentary on the 22 July 2010 decision of the International Court of Justice declaring Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence to be lawful. He expresses the view that while Kosovo's independence was inevitable, judicial determination of the issue was unsatisfactory as a matter of policy.

Parish's book on reconstruction in post-war Brcko, A Free City in the Balkans (2009), has attracted domestic and international attention. The book has been criticized for being too sceptical of the international community's statebuilding efforts in the country.

Before 2005 Parish worked in the legal department of the World Bank.

Between 2005 and 2007 Parish worked as head of legal department for the Brcko Final Award Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR). Shortly after leaving Bosnia in 2007, Parish wrote "The Demise of the Dayton Protectorate", which was later used to argue for closure of the OHR. He then moved to Geneva, where he worked in different law firms and held positions as visiting lecturer and Honorary Professor in various universities.

From 2000, Parish has been a non-practicing English barrister, English solicitor, a member of the Swiss bar and a New York attorney since 2005.

Parish attended Harrogate Grammar School before he moved to Cambridge University where he graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1996 with Triple First Class Honours. In 2004, he earned a Master of law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, and a Doctor of Juridical Science in 2007, with a thesis titled 'Reconstructing a divided society: learning from northeast Bosnia' whose Supervisors were the distinguished US Justice Richard A. Posner and his son, the renowned American political scientist Eric Posner.

Matthew Parish (born 1975 in Leeds) is a British international lawyer and scholar of international relations, based in Switzerland. He is well known for his wide-ranging views on geopolitics and the influence that international law has upon them.