Meron was born in Kalisz, Poland, to a Jewish family. Meron was held in a Nazi labor camp during World War II. In 1945, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. He received his legal education at the Hebrew University (M.J.), Harvard Law School (LL.M., J.S.D.) and Cambridge University (Diploma in Public International Law). He immigrated to the United States in 1978 and is a citizen of the United States.
Meron is a scholar of public international law, international humanitarian law, human rights and international criminal law. Prior to his immigration to the United States, Meron was a legal adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Starting in 1977, he has served as a Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and UC Berkeley, and a Professor of International Law at New York University School of Law, where he was named the Charles L. Denison Chair at New York University School of Law in 1994. In 2000-01 he served as Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State. In 2006 he was named Charles L. Denison Professor Emeritus and Judicial Fellow at New York University School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University since 2014, a visiting fellow at Mansfield College, and an academic associate at the Bonavero Human Rights Institute.
In 1990, Meron served as a “Public Member” of the United States Delegation to the CSCE Conference on Human Dimensions in Copenhagen. In 1998, he served as a member of U.S. Delegation to the Rome Conference on the establishment of an International Criminal Court. He served on several committees of experts of the ICRC, on Internal Strife, on Environment and Armed Conflicts, and on Customary Rules of International Humanitarian Law. He co-leads the annual ICRC-NYU seminars on international humanitarian law for UN diplomats. In 2022 he was appointed Special Advisor on International Humanitarian Law to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Meron is a member of the Institute of International Law and the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Honorary President of the American Society of International Law. He has also served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law. He was awarded the 2005 Rule of Law Award by the International Bar Association and the 2006 Manley O. Hudson Medal of the American Society of International Law.
He was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor by the President of the French Republic in 2007. He received the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2008. In 2009, Meron was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded a LLD honoris causa by the University of Warsaw in 2011 and LLD honoris causa by the University of Calisia, (Kalisz) in 2021, and in 2017 he was made Officer of the Order of Merit of Poland. He was also named “Grand Officier” of the National Order of Merit by the President of France in 2014. For service to criminal justice and international Humanitarian Law, Queen Elizabeth II made him an Honorary Companion of “the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George” (CMG) in 2019. That same year, he was also one of 17 honorees selected by One Young World and Vanity Fair for the inaugural Global Achievements List, cited for his contributions “for peace, justice and strong institutions” (UK March 2019 issue).
