Speaker: Dr Cordula Droege

In 2024, the International Committee of the Red Cross published their sixth report on international humanitarian law (IHL) and the challenges of contemporary armed conflicts. The report provides a broad overview of the major challenges posed to IHL today, and discusses a broad range of issues including nuclear weapons, ‘proxy’ and ‘hybrid’ warfare, new technologies, and humanitarianism.

In this talk, Dr Cordula Droege – the Chief Legal Officer and head of the Legal Division at the ICRC – will discuss the problems identified by the report, and reflect upon the current state of IHL.

This event is free and open to the public. Click here to join in online 

About the speaker

Dr Cordula Droege is the Chief Legal Officer and head of the legal division of the ICRC, where she leads the ICRC’s efforts to uphold, implement and develop international humanitarian law. She joined the ICRC in 2005 and has held a number of positions in the field and at headquarter, including as head of the legal advisers to operations, and most recently as chief of staff to the President of the ICRC. She has some twenty years of experience in the field of international law, and in her earlier career worked for the International Commission of Jurists, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Max Planck Institute for International Law. She holds a law degree and a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and an LL.M from the London School of Economics.

Chair: Dr Maria Varaki

Dr Maria Varaki is a Lecturer in International Law in the War Studies Department at King's College London. Before moving to London, she held research positions at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Helsinki and at the Law Faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was also an Assistant Professor of International Law at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

Maria holds a PhD in International Law from the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway, Ireland, and two LLM degrees in International and Comparative Law from Tulane University and New York University School of Law. She is currently a Research Associate on the Three Generations of Digital Human Rights ERC project (2023-2028) at Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law.