Matthew Parish is a British international lawyer and scholar of international relations, based in England and Eastern Europe. In September 2021, Parish was sentenced by a Swiss court to three years in prison for his role staging a fraudulent arbitration to prove the authenticity of incriminating evidence in a political dispute between rival members of the Kuwaiti ruling family.

Early life

Parish was born in Leeds, in West Yorkshire. He is a graduate of Cambridge University.

Career and publications

Parish worked in the legal department of the International Supervisor for Brčko, part of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His first book, on reconstruction in post-war Brčko, A Free City in the Balkans (2009), drew on his experience working for the OHR. The book has been criticized for being too sceptical of the international community's statebuilding efforts in the country. Parish's second book, Mirages of International Justice, was published in 2011. The book describes international law as "for the most part quite useless". According to a sceptical review by Christian Axboe Nielsen, the book "concludes by wishing that both international law and international organizations would disappear from the face of the earth". Nielsen compares the book unfavourably to A Free City in the Balkans, describing the latter as making "provocative and, by comparison, cogent arguments". 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. Gentium was one of the first boutique arbitration law firms that involved teams of senior arbitration lawyers splitting away from large established law firms and forming their own smaller practices under new brands. The group was nominated as a Global Arbitration Review Top 100 Law Firm worldwide in 2016 and 2017. In November 2018 Parish ceased to manage the company having handed control to a new partner.

Legal issues

In 2018, Parish was found guilty of criminal defamation in Switzerland for making reports to Western intelligence services accusing his former clients, Murat Seitnepesov and Konstantin Ryndin, of money laundering, fraud and financing terrorism. Sentenced to two months, Parish reports in a self-published book that he spent 23 days in prison. Parish was further charged in 2019. He was subsequently fined, given a one-year suspended prison sentence and instructed by the court to see a psychiatrist. Reuters reported that a spokesman for the Geneva prosecutor's office said: "Mr. Parish is found guilty of defamation, calumny, a coercion attempt and of failing to conform with an authority’s decision." Parish indicated his intention to appeal the conviction. Parish has also been convicted in Switzerland for his role in a fraudulent arbitration in a dispute between rival members of the Kuwaiti ruling family aimed at falsely authenticating fraudulent videos showing corruption and breach of Iran sanctions. AP reported in February 2021 that a court hearing had been held and adjourned until August 2021. In September 2021, Parish was convicted and sentenced to three years' jail time and was banned from practicing law in Switzerland. As AP reports, "Judge Gonseth said he was an arbitration expert and 'manifestly' involved at all stages of the process". On 18 December 2023, Parish had an appeal against his conviction dismissed, though an appeal against his sentence was partially allowed, with the custodial element reduced to two years' imprisonment, all of which was suspended. In September 2024, an order allowing Parish to bring a libel claim against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed by the High Court in London. Parish said that the Wikipedia article about him was defamatory as it had been published in England and Wales, but Mrs Justice Steyn ruled that the London courts had no jurisdiction in the matter, as the issue related primarily to his career as a lawyer in Switzerland. The claim was also dismissed as it had been made more than a year after the date of publication, and because Parish had failed to disclose that he had been living and working outside England for over twenty years.

Works

Books