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September 2025 - August 2026
Study Mode
Full-time
Application start 4 November 2024
Application end 31 January 2025
Application end (with scholarship) 15 January 2025
Optional courses, offered in the Fall, are common to our LLM and MTJ programmes and allow students to deepen their expertise in their chosen fields. Each optional course is worth 3 ECTS credits and students must take 2 courses as part of their degree. Each course is limited to 20 students and students from our mother institutions (UNIGE and the Graduate Institute) are also welcome to register (If you are part of one of our mother institutions and you have questions, please contact masters-inquiries@geneva-academy.ch) Please see below for the optional courses we offer this academic year.
This course deals with contemporary and future challenges regarding the military uses of cyber technologies and operations and focuses on whether and how existing rules of international law apply in cyberspace. It starts by analyzing the application of general notions of international law (sovereignty, non-intervention, state responsibility, due diligence) and then moves to the relevance for cyber operations of the jus contra bellum rules contained in the United Nations (UN) Charter. Finally, the course examines whether and how international humanitarian law (IHL) and its fundamental rules and principles regulate cyber operations conducted in the context of an armed conflict of an international and non-international character. The course cuts across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together IHL, arms control law as well as UN law. It will provide students with a deeper understanding of the rules and principles pertaining to new weapons and military technologies, in particular cyber operations, but above all, it will equip them with the knowledge and ideas that will be needed to reconceptualize international law and legal approaches towards the regulation of transformative technological evolution in the 21 st century.
This course introduces students to the Islamic law of armed conflict and how it relates to the current conflicts in Muslim contexts. It examines the rules regulating the use of force during both international and non-international armed conflicts under classical Islamic law. Classical Islamic rules providing protection to certain persons and objects and those regulating certain means and methods of warfare are examined in order to find out, first, the impact/challenges surrounding their application in current armed conflict situations and, second, their compatibility with international humanitarian law rules. The course also discusses the distinction between the use of legitimate force and terrorism (both domestic and international) under Islamic law. It analyses the development of the classical Islamic public international law framework and its impact on the issues of the Islamic jus ad bellum and the jurisdiction of Islamic law. The course starts with identifying and defining the Islamic law key concepts, sources, and schools in order to familiarize the students with such a complex and highly technical legal system and understand the extent of its contemporary application.
This course examines the existing international legal framework and jurisprudence on the phenomenon of enforced disappearance. While the main focus is international human rights law, references are made, where pertinent, to international humanitarian law and international criminal law. During the course, the nature, definitions and consequences of the offence of enforced disappearance are analysed and the international legal framework aimed at preventing and punishing it is considered in-depth, discussing the potential pitfalls, and the problems in interpretation and application. The examination of the mandate and the functioning of the main international human rights mechanisms dealing with enforced disappearance is a central part of the course. Special attention will be devoted to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and the Committee on Enforced Disappearances. The case law on enforced disappearance developed by the UN Human Rights Committee, the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights will also be presented and discussed, to single out landmark judgments and interpretative discrepancies, as well as legal problems that remain to be addressed.
This course explores and discusses the design, commission and recognition of core international crimes through the prism of intersecting marginalized identities, primarily through gender. The course started by interrogating what we mean by ‘gender’ and ‘intersectionality’ and how their definition(s) illuminate or obscure the investigation and analysis of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It then examines a persisting insensitivity to crimes of sexual violence as well as the narrow definition of gender-based crimes. It ends by looking at gender-competent and intersectional approaches to the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, touching upon the investigation and analysis of the international criminal tribunals, accountability-driven documentation entities, journalists reporting on the commission of crimes as well as our own analysis.
Disasters caused by natural and technological hazards are a commonplace phenomenon, representing one of the most significant challenges for humanitarian actors and affected communities. Despite their magnitude, as magnified by the current Covid-19 pandemic, the attention of the international community towards the legal implications of disasters has been neglected for a long time, finally resulting in a scattered and heterogenous collection of instruments. This course will thus offer a critical survey of relevant sources, actors, universal and regional institutional frameworks and main legal issues relevant for such scenarios, as: operational challenges related to relief activities; human rights issues in disaster settings; disaster risk reduction or the relationship with other areas, as humanitarian assistance in international humanitarian law. A specific focus will be paid to legal and humanitarian challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. Through frontal lectures, complemented by interactive activities as case-studies and dialogues with practitioners, students can get a proper understanding of the rationale, structure and content of international law rules addressing the prevention, preparedness, response and recovery in the event of disasters and assess their impact for humanitarian actors, international organisations and domestic stakeholders.
Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly in 1948, the international community has developed a complex set of instruments, including treaties and soft law texts in order to protect our human rights. Today, international human rights law provides a legal framework with institutional possibilities for monitoring the implementation of these rights. In addition, this legal framework provides different avenues to complain about violations of these rights. This course will provide a practical insight into the United Nations(UN) human rights mechanisms, placing particular emphasis on the UN human rights treaty bodies and the UN Human Rights Council’s structure, procedures, current challenges and the pragmatic implications of their various functions.
Indigenous peoples, linguistic minorities, and ethnic groups, among others, typically claim a wide range of group-differentiated rights or accommodations in order to protect their specific cultures, overcome a history of abuse, and attain a higher level of equality vis-à-vis the larger majority population. Over the last decade, the discussion on how to accommodate such claims has become prominent in the growing literature on transitional justice and development. Managing diversity surely remains a challenge in all societies; yet, this task is especially acute in transitional societies divided along ethno-cultural lines that need to confront a legacy of past injustices. This course traces the main lines of these debates with a view to identifying different approaches to managing diversity and their implications for human rights, democratic governance, and political justice in transitional societies. Applying an intersectional analysis, the discussion aims at acknowledging the complexity of the experiences of injustice and discrimination that continue to damage inter-group relations, thus posing a significant threat to the success of political and social reforms. A practical and comparative focus will be provided through class discussions on specific cases from a variety of contexts.
The objective of the course is to analyse transitional justice through an innovative and most interesting prism: the experience of its actors, based on two observations made by Antonio Cassese and Kaminski and Kokoreff. It will notably address the experience of victims, judges and defendants of different forms of transitional justice, criminal or not. This approach will allow for an innovative critique of transitional justice, focussing on specific cases such as Tunisia, the international criminal tribunals and the commissions set up in connection with colonisation.
This course considers the status, obligations, and entitlements of non-state armed groups in different branches of public international law. It commences with an exploration of the idea of non-state armed groups and the uneasy fit between non-state armed groups and the state-centric international legal system. The focus then turns to a critical analysis of the place of non-state armed groups in international humanitarian law and international human rights law, before ending with the pressing issues of compliance and enforcement. Throughout, we will analyze specific rules of international law but also the practices of non-state armed groups.
Decolonisation can be described as a collection of repudiatory and resistant responses to the multifaceted inauguration of colonial ways of thinking, being and doing in the world from circa the late fifteenth century. These colonial logics rely on unequal ways of thinking of the body, space and time that have helped develop structures reliant on racism, classism, sexism, overexploitation, and xenophobia among others. As such, these systems of thought have helped produce, inter alia, racial injustice, extreme inequality, and environmental devastation, through the manufacture of race as a hierarchy of humanity, the kidnap and enslavement of African peoples, as well as the territorial commodification and occupation of land across the globe. Decolonisation describes a set of immediate and continuing responses developed by indigenous, racialised and colonised peoples to resist these multifaceted methods of imperialism. These responses have come in different forms – independence demands, outright resistance, calls for sovereignty and the restoration of lost knowledges etc. Over the last couple of years, a new wave of decolonisation has found its way into higher education in the Global North, igniting interest in the possibilities of decolonisation – especially within legal education and legal practice. This course will examine this history as an introduction to theories and practices of decolonisation and how they interact with the law. The course will begin with a background understanding of what decolonisation reacts to – the practice and logics of colonisation. We will then examine some of the various ways in which decolonisation has been theorised and practiced around the world and at different times. The majority of the course will consider how the foregoing impacts on different areas of law, as well as some possibilities for the future of decolonisation.
