Professor Phoebe Nyawade Okowa (born 1 January 1965 in Kericho, Kenya) is a leading Kenyan international law scholar, judge, and advocate whose career bridges academia, diplomacy, and high-stakes international litigation. She graduated top of her class with an LLB (First Class Honours) from the University of Nairobi in 1987, becoming the first woman in the Faculty of Law’s history to earn a first-class degree, and was admitted as an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya in 1990. She went on to the University of Oxford on a Foreign and Commonwealth Office Scholarship, obtaining the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) and completing a DPhil in 1994 under the supervision of Sir Ian Brownlie, one of the 20th century’s most influential international lawyers. Her monograph State Responsibility for Transboundary Air Pollution in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2000) is widely regarded as a seminal work on environmental harm and state accountability. Okowa is Professor of Public International Law and Director of Graduate Studies at Queen Mary University of London, and has previously taught at the University of Bristol, while holding visiting appointments in Lille, Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin and at New York University School of Law. Beyond academia, she has built a distinguished practice as counsel and consultant to governments and international organisations in proceedings before the International Court of Justice and other tribunals, in cases touching on genocide, maritime boundaries, climate change, the Chagos Archipelago, and the legal consequences of Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territory, as well as advisory proceedings at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea on climate obligations.  In 2016 she was appointed a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and in 2021 she was elected to the UN International Law Commission for the 2023–2027 term, becoming the first African woman ever to serve on the Commission; she later chaired its Drafting Committee in 2024 and was elected an Associate of the Institut de Droit International in 2025. On 12 November 2025, after concurrent rounds of voting in the UN General Assembly and Security Council, Okowa was elected a Judge of the International Court of Justice to fill the vacancy left by Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, making her the first Kenyan—and among a very small number of Africans—to sit on the UN’s principal judicial organ, with her election widely celebrated as a historic milestone for Kenya, Africa, and the global legal community.