Programme Description
The Academy of European Law holds two summer courses each year, on The Law of the European Union and on Human Rights.
The 2025 course on Human Rights engages with the question “Peace negotiations: What’s Law Got to Do with It?” in two ways.
First, the course will explore and grapple with the various ways in which law, including international law, bears on peace negotiations. In doing so, it will equip participants (lawyers and non-lawyers alike), including mediation practitioners and advisors, to address legal issues arising in negotiations.
Second, the course will interrogate and identify what (actually) amounts to law, seeking to differentiate law, and legal obligations, from other norms (political, social, cultural) that have a bearing on peace talks.
Through these insights, negotiators, facilitators, mediation practitioners, advisors, and lawyers will emerge better equipped to create, recognize, and navigate spaces within negotiations for the role of law, and within law for the politics of negotiations.
Throughout the course, participants will be exposed to the nuts and bolts of peace negotiations and will assess law’s potentially enabling and potentially restraining role.
Specific themes that will receive attention are procedural issues such as process design and representation, agenda setting, expert management, legal drafting and legal guarantees for the agreement, as well as substantive matters such as power-sharing, social and economic issues, and transitional justice.
The teaching format will include a mixture of moot negotiations, reflection sessions, drafting exercises, feedback sessions, and interactive lectures by peace mediation practitioners and scholars.
Research Themes