Palestine Liberation Organization in 2012. Schabas had been hired as a consultant to provide a legal analysis regarding the Palestinian bid for non-member observer status at the United Nations. Schabas stated that he was resigning to stop the controversy from overshadowing the work of the Gaza inquiry, whose results were due in March. Avigdor Lieberman hailed his resignation as an 'achievement for Israeli diplomacy'. In late 2019, Schabas defended the nation of Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in The Hague against charges of genocide towards its Rohingya population, brought by the republic of Gambia. Early life and education Schabas was born in Cleveland, Ohio, with strong roots in an Ashkenazi Jewish background, though his family name, which is a variation of the Yiddish word for "Sabbath" ("Shabbos" in Yiddish, derived from "Shabbat" in Hebrew), has been interpreted as perhaps suggesting also a Sephardic connection. His mother, Ann (née Fairley), was born in Canada and served as dean of the Faculty of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Toronto. His father, Ezra Schabas, is an American-born Canadian musician and author. His maternal grandparents were Barker Fairley, an English-born painter and scholar, and Margaret Fairley, a writer and educator also born in England. His paternal grandparents came from Galicia, and relatives on his father's side were murdered in the Holocaust. Schabas moved with his family to Toronto in 1952 and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the University of Toronto, and LL.B., LL.M. and LL.D. degrees from the Université de Montréal. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland and Northwestern University, Chicago. According to UN Watch, when Schabas was a PhD student in history at the University of Toronto in 1974, and a leader in the SDS group, he was the subject of a university investigation for allegedly violating human rights and freedoms by physically obstructing a visiting Harvard professor from speaking on campus. Schabas was suspended from the university for four years, later reduced to two. Career From 1991 to 2000 he was a professor of human rights law and criminal law at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), and he chaired the Department of Legal Studies from 1994 to 1998. He has taught as a visiting or adjunct professor at several other institutions, including McGill University, Queen's University Belfast, LUISS University in Rome,