Early Life and Education
Ziyad Baroud was born on 29 April 1970 in Jeita, Keserwan to parents Selim and Antoinette (née Salem). The first of two children, Baroud and his younger sister Maha were brought up in a middle-class civil household with no political ancestry, where both parents were high school teachers; their father a senior grade mathematics teacher and their mother an Arabic literature teacher. Baroud completed his high school education at Collège Saint Joseph – Antoura des Pères Lazaristes from which he graduated in 1988. He then attended the Faculty of Law at Saint Joseph University in Beirut from which he earned his Master's Degree in Law. He was admitted to the Beirut Bar Association in 1993.
From 1993 to 1996, Baroud worked as a trainee lawyer in Beirut in the cabinet of Ibrahim Najjar, who later served as minister of justice in the same government as Baroud. While working in the office of Najjar, Baroud contributed along with a handful of judges and fellow lawyers to the drafting of a legal monthly supplement in An-Nahar "Houqouq Annas" (Ar: حقوق الناس) or "People's Rights", the first of its kind, designed to familiarize people with judiciary rights and jargon and promote the implementation and modernization of Lebanese laws with the aim of bringing more justice to society. At the same time, Baroud was pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Paris X in Paris, France, a school that also graduated Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin among other influential personalities. Baroud is currently preparing his doctoral thesis on the subject of "Decentralization in Lebanon after the Taif Agreement", a topic that is one of his main subjects of expertise as well as one of the major lobbying points of his political agenda.
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