UCIHL - Louise Doswald-Beck

Louise Doswald-Beck was appointed a Professor of the Graduate Institute of International Studies and Director of the UCIHL on 1 October 2003.

Of British origin, she began her academic career in 1975 after being called to the Bar in London. She was a lecturer in international law at Exeter University and then at London University where she taught, inter alia, LLM courses on the law of armed conflict and the use of force and the international protection of human rights.

Between 1987 and February 2001, she was a legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross and became Head of the Legal Division in March 1998. During her period at the ICRC, she played a major role in negotiations that led to various international instruments such as: the Statute of the International Criminal Court and its Elements of Crimes, Protocols II (amended) and IV of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the Ottawa Convention on Anti-Personnel Landmines, Protocol II to the Hague Convention on Cultural Property and the San Remo Manual on armed conflicts at sea.

Between March 2001 and August 2003, she was Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists, a non-governmental organisation that works for the protection of human rights through the rule of law.

She has written extensively on subjects relating to the use of force, humanitarian law and human rights law, including the ICRC’s study on customary international humanitarian law for which she was awareded by the Ciardi Prize at the time of the XVIIth Congress of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War.

Publications