Executive president and co-founder of Kreddha; International Peace Council for States, Peoples and Minorities. In this capacity he currently facilitates/mediates a number of peace processes between governments of sovereign states and population groups within those states.

Michael van Walt served as UN senior legal advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the East Timor transitional government (UNTAET) in 2001-2002. He has been Legal Advisor to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration since 1985 in which capacity he advised the Tibetan negotiation team and spearheaded an initiative at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in the 1980's and 90's.

He was adjunct professor of International Law at Golden Gate University in San Francisco until recently. He holds a master’s and a doctorate degrees in law from the University of Utrecht, and an LLM from Wayne State University in Detroit. He has practiced law in Washington DC, London and San Francisco with the law firms of Wilmer Cutler and Pickering, and of Pettit and Martin, where he worked on matters involving public international law, corporate law and international arbitration.

From 1991 to 1998 he was the General Secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO). During that period he also served as UNDP consultant on indigenous peoples in the Sakha Republic of the Russian Federation (1994); legal advisor to the All-Bougainville Leaders Peace Talks in Cairns, Australia (1994); advisor to the Chechen government delegation on their negotiations with the Russian Federation (1994-97); and advisor to the Abkhazian government delegation in peace talks between Georgia and Abkhazia (1993-95).

He was a member of the Netherlands Development Assistance Research Council (RAWOO), an advisory body of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from 1996 to 2007.

Michael van Walt’s publications include The Implementation of the Right to Self-Determination as a Contribution to Conflict Prevention, UNESCO / UNESCO Centre of Catalonia (Barcelona, 1999) and The Status of Tibet: History, Rights and Prospects in International Law, Westview Press / Wisdom Press (Boulder / London, 1987) and contributions of numerous chapters and articles to various publications.