Michiel Pestman

Lecturer in Law

Michiel Pestman is a Lecturer in Law at UCLA School of Law and teaches International Criminal Law and the Food Law and Policy Clinic.

Pestman has been a practicing attorney in the Netherlands since 1994, and partner in the leading Dutch law firm Prakken d’Oliveira Human Rights Lawyers for 20 years. In this capacity, he has a diverse criminal and international practice, specializing in financial and white-collar crime, extradition and other international procedures, terrorism and international crimes and international human rights. Pestman was lead counsel for defendants before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. He advised the Bosnian government on the first ever case under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice, and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.  He recently passed the California Bar Exam.

In the Netherlands, Pestman was a regular guest lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leiden, teaching international criminal law, extradition, and international terrorism at the invitation of the faculty there. From 2010 – 2018, Pestman acted as both client and supervisor to the University of Amsterdam law clinic. Pestman also delivered continuing legal education sessions to fellow practitioners in the areas of criminal law, extradition and professional conduct.

Pestman worked closely with journalists and the media in the interest of his cases, and was a frequent guest on television and radio current affairs programs. Over a period of 4 years, he was legal counsel to a consumer campaign against slavery in the chocolate industry, appearing on a weekly consumer television program as well as in the feature length documentary “The Chocolate Case” (2016).

Pestman has authored numerous articles and Op Eds on legal and political issues, and had a regular column in the principal Dutch legal weekly, the Advocatenblad. He has had a number of essays and scholarly articles published in Dutch journals, and has an article on terrorism forthcoming in the Dutch “Defence Handbook” 2021, the standard reference book for criminal defence practitioners in the Netherlands.