Conceptualizing the Conference
programme committee
members of the programme committee
Helmut Aust
Helmut Philipp Aust is a Professor of Public and International Law at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the Co-Chair of the ILA Committee Urbanisation and International Law – Potential & Pitfalls and currently a member of the board of ESIL as well as a member of the International Advisory Panel of the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement on the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. He is also an Associate Fellow of the German Council on Foreign Relations. He has published widely on questions of public international law and comparative constitutional law. His publications include Complicity and the Law of State Responsibility (CUP 2011), Encounters between Foreign Relations Law and International Law (CUP 2021, co-edited with Thomas Kleinlein) as well as the Research Handbook on International Law and Cities (Edward Elgar 2021, co-edited with Janne E. Nijman) which was awarded the 2022 Nijman) which was awarded the 2022 inaugural ESIL Collaborative Book Prize.
Freya Baetens
Freya Baetens, Cand.Jur./ Lic.Jur. (Ghent), LL.M. (Columbia), Ph.D. (Cambridge) is Professor of Public International Law and Research Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub (Oxford University). She also holds the Chair of EU External Economic Law at the Europa Institute (Leiden University) and was awarded the 2024 Francqui Chair (Ghent University). As a Member of the Brussels Bar, she regularly acts as counsel or expert in disputes before international and regional courts and tribunals. Among other, she is listed on the EU Roster of Arbitrators and Trade & Sustainable Development (TSD) experts and the ICSID Panel of Arbitrators and Conciliators.
Andreas Buser
Andreas Buser has a post-doc position at Freie Universität Berlin where he teaches courses in international law, constitutional- and human rights, and administrative law. He is also affiliated with the Berlin/Potsdam DFG Research Group "International Rule of Law - Rise or Decline?". Andreas Buser has been an Emile Noël Fellow at the NYU Jean Monnet Center for International Economic Law and Justice (2023/2024) and conducted research stays at the University of Glasgow, the University of Xiamen, and National University Delhi. His areas of expertise cover international environmental law, international economic law, human rights law, the law of state responsibility, EU environmental law, and German constitutional law.
Veronika Fikfak
Veronika Fikfak is Professor of Human Rights and International Law at University College London and a co-Director of the UCL Institute for Human Rights. Her current research focuses on reparations and compensation in international law, execution and enforcement of international judgments, and access to human rights justice. She is a managing editor of the American Journal of International Law Unbound and a member of the Board of the European Society of International Law. She also serves as a judge ad hoc at the European Court of Human Rights.
Prisca Feihle
Prisca Feihle is postdoctoral research fellow in public law at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on public international law, in particular the law of international responsibility and international human rights law, as well as on (comparative) constitutional law. She holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and has been a Visiting Fellow to the European University Institute (Florence).
Bálint Kovacs
Bálint Kovács is Assistant Lecturer of International Economic Law at the University of Szeged and Researcher at the Ferenc Mádl Institute of Comparative Law in Budapest. He will soon earn his PhD from the University of Debrecen with a thesis focusing on small and medium-sized investors’ access to investor-state dispute settlement. His professional interests also include regional economic integration, the legal accommodation of economic security, and the human rights of minorities. He has been active in ESIL since 2022, as a member of the Diversity Advisory Body.
Heike Krieger
Heike Krieger holds the Chair for International and Public Law at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is Vice-President of the German Society of International Law and a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation. She has acted as chair of the interdisciplinary Berlin Potsdam Research Group (Kollegforschungsgruppe) ‘The International Rule of Law – Rise or Decline?’ (funded by the German Research Foundation) between 2019 and 2024 and was a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, between 2017 and 2021. Heike Krieger is Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law (T.M.C. Asser Press and Springer). Her recent publications include the edited volumes ‘Tracing Value Change in the International Legal Order’ (OUP 2023, co-edited with Andrea Liese); ‘Law-making and Legitimacy in International Humanitarian Law’ (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021, editor) and ‘Due Diligence in the International Legal Order’ (OUP 2020, co-edited with Anne Peters and Leonhard Kreuzer).
Daniel C. Peat
Daniel is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden Law School. He is Academic Coordinator of the Advanced LLM on International Dispute Settlement and Arbitration and Director of the Leiden International Administrative Law Clinic. Before joining Leiden University, Daniel worked at the International Court of Justice as an Associate Legal Officer for Judge Abdulqawi A. Yusuf. He was awarded a PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Gonville & Caius College and a recipient of the WM Tapp Studentship. Daniel’s first monograph, Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals (Cambridge University Press 2019) won the European Society of International Law Book Prize in 2020. He has published articles in the British Yearbook of International Law, the Yale Journal of International Law, the N.Y.U. Journal of International Law & Politics, the Journal of International Dispute Settlement, and the Journal of World Trade & Investment, amongst others. Daniel also co-edited Interpretation in International Law (Oxford University Press 2015) with Andrea Bianchi and Matthew Windsor. Daniel is a member of the Board of the European Society of International Law, a member of the Advisory Board of the International Community Law Review, a member of the ISDS Academic Forum, and was formerly on the Editorial Board of the Leiden Journal of International Law. He also acted as co-rapporteur of the International Law Association Study Group on the Content and Evolution of the Rules of Interpretation.
Silvia Steininger
Silvia Steininger is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Hertie School's Centre for Fundamental Rights Berlin and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law Heidelberg. She has been an inaugural member of the ESIL Early-Career Network Co-Ordinating Committee. Her research focusses on international law, in particular interdisciplinary approaches, regional human rights, and international economic law, as well as the role of domestic, regional, and international courts.