Evelyne Schmid

Evelyne Schmid is Professor of Public International Law at Lausanne University in Switzerland. Her focus is on positive obligations in international (human rights) law and state omissions in fulfilling them. Her research interests also include the relationality of states and corporations, planetary boundaries, arms transfers, universities, and the law of state neutrality. In Lausanne, she teaches public international law, human rights law, and international humanitarian law, as well as related aspects of the law of armed conflict. 

While in residence at the Bonavero Institute, she will explore why some of the problems identified in earlier projects concerning the implementation of states’ duties to protect—problems that persist even when states take regulatory initiatives—have proven so difficult to overcome, while also drawing on previous findings that highlight various actors’ agency in shaping, at least to some extent, what we make of international law. 

One of these earlier projects was a large sociolegal project that identified the concrete mechanisms and processes facilitating the engagement of subnational authorities, including legislators, with international obligations. The SNSFfunded project led to publications such as Engaging with Human Rights: How Subnational Actors Use Human Rights Treaties in Policy Processes (Palgrave SocioLegal Studies, 2024, with J. Miaz, M. Niederhauser, C. Kaempfer and M. Maggetti). Evelyne Schmid is also the author of Taking Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Seriously in International Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press, 2015), a former VicePresident of the European Society of International Law, and acted as a thirdparty intervenor in Klimaseniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland before the European Court of Human Rights.