Speaker: Professor Giulio Bartolini

In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted by resolution A/79/128 where it decided to ‘elaborate and conclude a legally binding instrument on the protection of persons in the event of disasters, without prejudice to the legal effects of any particular provisions contained therein, by the end of 2027 at the latest’. With its adoption, the UNGA has thus paved the way for negotiations on a universal treaty on the international legal framework relevant to disasters, based on the draft articles of the International Law Commission adopted in 2016.

In this talk, Prof Giulio Bartolini – Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of International Disaster Law - will focus on the long journey of the ILC DAs towards a treaty, the next steps and the legal issues that will be at the centre of the upcoming negotiations among States.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the speaker

Professor Giulio Bartolini is Full Professor of International Law at Roma Tre University where he is also director of the IHL Legal Clinic.

Prof Bartolini is Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of International Disaster Law (Brill) and lecturer of International Disaster Law at the Geneva Academy of IHL and HRs. In this area he has been legal assistant to the ILC Special Rapporteur on the topic ‘Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters’; academic responsible of the IFRC Disaster Law Database; and in charge of EU projects in this area. Prof Bartolini is member of the ESIL Board, a judge at the NATO Mission Appeal Tribunals, President of the IHL Scientific Committee of the Italian Red Cross and he is currently coordinating the working group established by the Italian Ministry of Defence for drafting the manual on international law applicable to military missions.

Chair

Dr Maria Varaki is a Lecturer in International Law in the Department of War Studies 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.