Olympia Bekou is Professor of Public International Law and Head of the School of Law at the University of Nottingham. She also heads the International Criminal Justice Unit of the University of Nottingham Human Rights Law Centre. Olympia read law at the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece and in 2000 was admitted to the Greek Bar. She completed the LLM in International Law at the University of Cambridge and obtained her PhD in International Criminal Law from the University of Nottingham, for which she had been awarded a NATO Fellowship. Olympia joined the School of Law in September 2002 and currently teaches International Criminal Law. Over the years, Olympia has been a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany, and she has also held visiting positions at the TC Beirne School of Law; the University of Queensland, Australia; the University of Nantes, France; and Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She has presented her research in over forty countries around the world and is a frequent speaker in expert meetings, workshops, and conferences.

Catherine Brölmann is Professor of Public International Law and Head of the Department of International and European Law at the University of Amsterdam.

Maria George is a PhD candidate in international law at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. Her research areas are international climate change, trade, and investment law. She has previously worked in international dispute settlement in trade and investment disputes and on domestic legislative drafting. She has also interned at the World Trade Organization in the Economic Research and Statistics Division.

Marlies Hesselman is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen Faculty of Law and has chaired the Groningen Centre for Health Law since 2023. She holds an LLB from Leiden University; an LLM International Law, specialisation human rights (cum laude, top 2 per cent); an LLM European Law, spec. human rights; and a PhD in International Human Rights Law on modern energy services access from Groningen University. Dr Hesselman also studied at Copenhagen University and was a funded visiting scholar at the London School of Economics. Dr Hesselman sits on the Scientific Steering Committee of the interdisciplinary Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health and is founder and academic co-coordinator of the Joint Summer School on Global Governance of Health Vulnerabilities in Africain Tanzania. She also recently co-founded the new Working Group on Human Rights & Climate Crisis at the Netherlands Network of Human Rights Research.

Sotirios Ioannis Lekkas is a lecturer in International Law at the University of Sheffield School of Law, and the deputy director of the Sheffield Centre for International and European Law (SCIEL). Prior to this position, Sotirios was postdoctoral researcher for the TRICI-Law project (ERC grant agreement no 759728) at the Department of Transboundary Legal Studies of the University of Groningen. He also worked as a judicial fellow at the ICJ and as a tutor in public international law at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law. He holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford. He has studied law in Athens and London (University College London), where he was awarded the George Schwarzenberger Prize in International Law by the University of London. He is also a (non-practising) member of the Bar in Athens, Greece.

Gabrielle Marceau was nominated as Honorary Professor (Emeritus) at the University of Geneva on 1 April 2025. Professor Marceau was appointed as a lecturer in 2000 and became an Associate Professor in the Department of Public International Law and International Organization at the Faculty of Law at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in 2005. She teaches World Trade Organization (WTO) law, supervises numerous master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, and organises conferences and research seminars. She also created a doctoral seminar. She is also visiting professor at the University of Ottawa, Law Faculty – Hyman Soloway Chair, and at other institutions. Professor Marceau serves on several scientific councils promoting international economic law. She has been the president of the Society of International Economic Law, is a member of the board of directors of the Geneva Society for Law and Legislation, and is a counsellor of the American Society of International Law. Professor Marceau is a specialist in dispute settlement and the legal relationships between international trade and non-commercial considerations (such as environment, human rights, labour, etc.), with more than 125 publications to her name. Gabrielle Marceau has also worked at the Secretariat World Trade Organization for over thirty years, serving as a legal adviser in international disputes, in the cabinet of Director-General Pascal Lamy, and in the Economic Research and Statistics Division.

Panos Merkouris is Professor of International Law at the University of Groningen. His five-year project on The Rules of Interpretation of Customary International Law was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (ERC grant agreement no 759728). He specialises in interpretation, law of treaties, sources of international law, and dispute settlement. Professor Merkouris is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law (NYIL) and the International Community Law Review (ICLR). He was also the co-rapporteur of the ILA Study Group on the Content and Evolution of Rules of Interpretation in International Law. He is the author of the monograph Treaties in Motion (Cambridge University Press 2020, co-authored with Professor Fitzmaurice) and Article 31(3)(c) of the VCLT, and the Principle of Systemic Integration: Normative Shadows in Plato’s Cave (Martinus Nijhoff 2015). The latter has been cited with approval by a Chamber of the International Criminal Court. He has numerous publications on interpretation, law of treaties, and customary international law.

Nina Mileva is Assistant Professor of International Law at the University of Groningen. She completed her PhD (University of Groningen) in 2023 within the ERC-funded project TRICI-Law. Prior to this, she obtained an LLM in Public International Law (Utrecht University). Dr Mileva is currently a member of the Coordinating Committee of the Interest Group on International Legal Theory and Philosophy (IGILTP) of the European Society of International Law (ESIL). Her research interests lie in the fields of general international law, legal theory, public interest litigation, and critical approaches to international law. In addition to her PhD monograph entitled A Theory of Interpretation for Customary International Law, Dr. Mileva has authored several peer-reviewed papers and chapters in edited volumes.

Elisa Morgera is UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights and a Professor of International Law and Sustainability at the University of Durham. She specialises in international biodiversity law and its linkages with human rights, notably the rights of Indigenous Peoples and small-scale fishing communities, everyone’s right to a healthy environment, health and science, and business responsibility to respect human rights. She was the director of the One Ocean Hub, a global inter-disciplinary research collaboration of research institutions in the UK, Africa, South Pacific, and the Caribbean, as well as UN agencies and other international partners. The One Ocean Hub pioneered research on human rights and the marine environment with a view to better connecting marine and social sciences and the arts, to support fair and inclusive decision-making for a healthy ocean whereby people and planet flourish.

Thomas Nektarios Papanastasiou (LLB, LLM, MA, PhD) is an Associate Professor of Public International Law at the Department of Law, School of Law, University of Nicosia (UNIC Athens). He achieved his PhD from Waseda University, Graduate School of Asian Pacific Studies (Tokyo, Japan, specializing in International Investment Law.). His current research interests lie on the protection of foreign investments, the role of human rights in international investment arbitration, the right to property in occupied Cyprus, and the legal framework of offshore energy investments. He is the co-author (with N. Rubins and S. Kinsella) of International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2020) and author of two more books and various articles. Thomas worked as a legal expert on the UNIDROIT Principles of International Investment Contracts representing the Law Office of the Republic of Cyprus, as a consultant to the World Bank (WB, Washington, DC) and as a trainee at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Paris). He is a scholarship recipient from the Japanese Government (Ministry of Education-MEXT). His dissertation, ‘The Legal Protection of Foreign Investments against Political Risk: Japanese Business in the Asian Energy Sector’, was awarded with the 2013 Arghyrios Fatouros Prize by the International Law Association (Hellenic Branch). He has also been elected Treasurer of the Hellenic Society of International Law and International Relations (2026–2028) and Vice President of the Cyprus?Japan Friendship Association (2025–2026).

Ilias Plakokefalos is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the School of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Athens. He holds an LLB from the University of Essex, an LLM from Tulane University, and a PhD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He was post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam (2012–15) and assistant professor at Utrecht University (2015–17). He has worked as an advisor to the Greek government (2017–19) and at the Greek Parliament (2019–23). He is a fellow at Athens Public International Law Center of the Law School of the University of Athens.

Ellen Policinski is an ICRC legal advisor working on the project to update the Commentaries on the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols. She has previously held a number of positions at the ICRC at headquarters and in the field, including editor-in-chief of the International Review of the Red Cross, an academic journal produced by the ICRC and published by Cambridge University Press. Prior to joining the ICRC, she worked on the IHL team at the American Red Cross and as a consultant at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. She has an LLM from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and a JD from the University of Villanova Charles Widger School of Law.

Yannick Radi is Professor of Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of UC Louvain and an invited professor at the Hague Academy of International Law. He is also a member of the ICSID Panel of Arbitrators and he is on the List of Trade and Sustainable Development Experts, for dispute settlement panels under EU Trade Agreements. His areas of expertise include State responsibility and the law of treaties, international dispute settlement, international investment law, and sustainable development. He is the author of several publications in these fields, notably Rules and Practices of International Investment Law and Arbitration, a textbook published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Vishakha Raj is a lawyer from India with a master’s degree in international trade and investment law from the World Trade Institute, University of Bern. She is based in Bern and works at Besso AG, a company that leverages artificial intelligence to simplify trade regulations for businesses.

Leila Nadya Sadat is James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law and long-time director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law. She has served as the Special Adviser on Crimes Against Humanity to the International Court Prosecutor since 2012 and was a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2001 to 2003. In AY 2021, she was a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and is currently a visiting fellow at Yale’s Schell Center for Human Rights. Sadat is an authority in the fields of public international law, international criminal law, human rights, and foreign affairs, and has published more than 165 books and articles in leading journals, academic presses, and media outlets throughout the world, including leading casebooks on international criminal law and public international law; a monograph, The International Criminal Court and the Transformation of International Law: Justice for the New Millenium, and several edited volumes. Sadat directs the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, a ground-breaking project launched in 2008 that wrote the world’s first global treaty on crimes against humanity and continues to spearhead global efforts to negotiate this important new treaty. Closer to home, she has been working on a project on gun violence and human rights, recently publishing “Torture in Our Schools?” with the Harvard Law Review, that addresses the crisis of mass shootings in US schools. She was the first woman to receive the Alexis de Tocqueville Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Paris, France (2011) and received an Honorary Doctorate from Northwestern University as well as the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award from Washington University in 2017. Sadat is the chairwoman of the International Law Association (American Branch), chair of the American Association of Law Schools Section on International Law, and a member of the American Law Institute and the US Council on Foreign Relations. Sadat holds law degrees from Columbia Law School, Tulane Law School, and the University of Paris I – Sorbonne

Jure Vidmar is Chair of Public International Law at Maastricht University. He is also member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, member of the OSCE Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in Geneva, and serves as Judge ad hoc of the European Court of Human Rights. Prior to coming to Maastricht, he held teaching and research positions at Oxford University, Harvard Law School, University of Amsterdam, and University of Nottingham.

Ineta Ziemele is a judge of the Court of Justice of the EU since 2020, the former president of the Latvian Constitutional Court, and former judge and section president of the European Court of Human Rights. She is Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the Riga Graduate School of Law (Latvia). Judge Ziemele obtained a law degree from the University of Latvia in 1993, which she supplemented that year by a postgraduate study of the American legal system, the law and politics of the European Communities, and political science (University of Aarhus, Denmark). She went on to obtain a master’s degree in international law at the University of Lund (Sweden) in 1994 and completed her studies at Cambridge University, where she received her PhD in law in 1999. She began her professional career as a parliamentary assistant at the Latvian Parliament from 1990 to 1992, before working as a consultant to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Parliament from 1992 to 1995. She has been an adviser to the prime minister of Latvia in 1995 on issues of international and European law. From 1999 to 2001, she worked at the Directorate General of Human Rights of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg (France). Judge Ziemele’s academic career began in 1993. She was first a university assistant in the Legal and Political Theory Department and the International Law and Law of the Sea Department at the University of Latvia. She went on to work as a lecturer in International Law and European Law until 1999. In 1995, she founded the Human Rights Institute at the University of Latvia, of which she was the director also until 1999. In 2001, she was elected to the Söderberg Chair for the purposes of teaching international law at the newly established Riga Graduate School of Law (Latvia). From 2001 to 2005, she also taught at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Lund as a visiting professor. In 2025, she was elected full member of the Academy of Science of Latvia to which she contributes through her legal research, resulting in numerous books and articles in international law, constitutional law, and EU constitutional law. She is the founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Baltic Yearbook of International Law and the author of one of the leading books in the field, State Continuity and Nationality: The Baltic States and Russia (2nd rev. ed., Brill, 2025).