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AEL: Summer Course on Human Rights - Peace Negotiations: What’s Law Got to Do with It? (LAW-SS-AELHRL-24)

LAW-SS-AELHRL-24

Description

This summer course engages with the question “Peace negotiations: What’s Law Got to Do with It?” in two ways. On the one hand, it interprets the question as an invitation to explore the various ways in which law, including international law, bears on peace negotiations. In doing so, the course enhances (future) peace mediators’ skills in addressing legal issues. On the other hand, the question requires participants to think about what amounts to law, and to differentiate law from other types of norms (political, social, cultural) that have a bearing on peace talks. These insights will enable both peace mediators and lawyers to create and navigate spaces within the law for the politics of negotiations, and within negotiations for the role of law. Throughout the course, participants, lawyers and non-lawyers alike, are familiarized with the nuts and bolts of peace negotiations and 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. 

Convenors:

• Barney Afako, Member of the UN Mediation Support Unit Standby Team, Chief Legal Advisor to the Southern Sudanese mediation in the Juba Peace Talks (2006-2008)
• Sarah Nouwen, Professor of Public International Law, EUI

Sessions: 16-27 June 2025

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 26 to 30 September 2024

Register for this course