Kathy-Ann Brown was elected as Judge of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea as of October 2020, and is a member of the Seabed Disputes Chamber. Prior to this, she was the Permanent Representative of Jamaica to the International Seabed Authority. She has served as the Chief Technical Adviser to the Prime Minister, and Deputy Solicitor General, International Affairs, Attorney General’s Chambers, Jamaica. In the preceding decades she worked with various regional and international organisations in London, Brussels and Geneva, providing technical assistance to developing countries in the following roles: Deputy Director/Adviser (Legal), Economic and Legal Section of the Special Advisory Services Division, Commonwealth Secretariat; External Trade Consultant providing technical assistance to the African, Caribbean and Pacific Secretariat; and Senior Technical Adviser (Legal) Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery. She has served as counsel in disputes before the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and as a panelist in WTO disputes. She has also testified as an expert on WTO law before the CCJ. Prior to this she lectured international law, including the Law of the Sea (L.L.M.) and International Economic and Development Law (LL.B.), at the Faculty of Law, Cave Hill Campus, University of the West Indies, and more recently, in 2019, taught Advanced International Law (L.L.M) at the UWI Mona Campus. For the academic year 2022-2023, she taught the Law of the Sea (L.L.M.) at the University of Guyana.
Dr. Brown pursued her undergraduate studies at the UWI Faculty of Law, Barbados, and subsequently attended the Norman Manley Law School, Jamaica. She pursued post-graduate studies in International Law at Cambridge University, England and received her PhD degree from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada.
Dr. Brown has published on the law of sea and international trade law. She is a member of the National Consultative Group on the International Court of Justice, and was inducted into the Hall of Eminent International Caribbean Jurists in 2019.