CTFIC0062/2025 Ahmed Mahmoud Hashim v Charles Cross - London LLC

Lord Thomas has been President of the Qatar International Court since 2018.

Lord Thomas was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1969, becoming a Queen’s Counsel in 1984. In 1996, he was appointed a High Court Judge and was assigned to the Queen’s Bench Division, serving on the Commercial Court. In 2003, he became a Lord Justice of Appeal and was appointed to the Privy Council. He served as the Senior Presiding Judge from 2003 to 2006. 

In 2008, he was appointed Vice President of the Queen’s Bench Division and Deputy Head of Criminal Justice. In 2011, he became President of the Queen’s Bench Division. Thereafter, in 2013, he succeeded Lord Judge as Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He retired from that post in 2017, prior to taking up the present position in Qatar where he succeeded Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers. 

Lord Thomas holds several extra-judicial posts, including as Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Fellow of the Universities of Cardiff, Aberystwyth, Swansea and Bangor and Honorary Doctor of Law of the Universities of South Wales, the West of England, Wales and of Cardiff Metropolitan University. He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

In 2016, he formed the Standing International Forum of Commercial Courts. He was appointed Chairman of the Financial Markets Law Committee in November 2017. He has been Chancellor of Aberystwyth University since January 2018.
 

Fritz Brand has been a judge of the Qatar International Court since 2019.

Immediately after receiving his LL.B in 1972, he was appointed as senior lecturer at the law faculty of the University of Stellenbosch, where he taught until the end of 1976. In 1977, he joined the Cape Bar where he practiced as an advocate until September 1992. During that period, he served on the Cape Bar Council for about ten years. In 1989, he received his letters patent as a senior counsel. In 1992, he was appointed as a judge of the High Court in Cape Town. After serving as an acting judge of appeal at the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein in 2000, he was appointed permanently to that court. In 2010, he was appointed as an acting judge to the Constitutional Court for two terms, retaining his permanent position on the Supreme Court of Appeal bench. Since his retirement from that Court in 2015, he has been appointed to the Appeal Court of Botswana and to the Supreme Court of Fiji - positions which he still holds.

Dr. Talal Abdulla Al-Emadi is the Dean of College of Law at Qatar University (QU), and a founding faculty member of the College of Law. He is a registered lawyer with the Qatari Bar. He was seconded from QU to the Amiri Diwan as a legal counselor for the Minister of State for the Council of Ministers Affairs. He holds a doctorate degree in law (DPhil) from the University of Oxford. His thesis questioned the preference of joint venture agreements in the Qatari gas industry. He holds a Master degree in law (LLM) from Harvard University, and he returned to Harvard as a Visiting Scholar in 2010. He was among the first QU law graduating class, in 1994, to receive the Bachelor of law degree (LLB) after which he was the first teaching assistant (TA) who joined the then Department of Law (now College of Law). He is also an alumnus of Georgetown Leadership Seminar (Washington DC) and the Cornell University Public Sector Leadership Program, as part of the first the Arabic cohort through the UN’s ESCWA.