OPEN COURSES AUTUMN 2023
The International Business Lawyer in Practice
5-6 October 2023
This course, taught by Mr. Stefano Agostini, aims at providing practical insights on how the legal profession is practiced in an international organization. It will describe the process to structure a legal risk assessment and navigate areas where the application of the law is unsettled or unresolved with a view to providing clients with a framework in which they can operate their business. The course will also examine how to solve problems, the role of legal counsels and how they may bring more to the table that just legal expertise. Finally, as it all comes to money, the course will focus on structuring and managing a legal budget for the strategic financial planning of a legal department.
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International Banking Regulations
19 October & 2 November 2023
This course, taught by Professor Carlo Lombardini, will deal with the main aspects of banking regulation and supervision. These include the organisation and governance of banks and banking groups, their supervision, their resolution and AML regulation. The main risks that banks have to face will be presented. The course will present not only theoretical issues but also practical examples.
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Human Rights & Climate Change
23-24 November 2023
This course, taught by Professor Evelyne Schmid and Ms. Lara Blecher, will introduce participants to the interaction between climate change and human rights law. It will cover the basics about how climate change threatens human rights enjoyment and will explore the contours of the debate about how or to what extent human rights law is, or is not, able to take into account climate change threats, locally and from the perspective of global distributive justice. Participants will learn about some of the most well-known types of international climate litigation strategies based on human rights law (litigation against states, against corporations/non-state actors, advisory proceedings), and, vice versa, will also briefly look into litigation strategies by powerful non-state actors or by governments who attempt to curb or delay climate action or to shrink the space for environmental protection and activism.
The course will also examine various aspects of the ‘just transition.’ It will explore the international legal foundation for this concept and analyse examples of how just transition considerations are playing out in the real world. Participants will be asked to draft a ‘just transition plan’ from the perspective of a government, a trade union, and a business taking into account the link between climate and human rights and the identification of tensions that prevent good solutions to dealing properly with both issues.
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International Competition Law
30 November - 1 December 2023
This course, taught by Professor Damiano Canapa, provides students with an overview of the regulation that governs business practices in order to avoid restrictions of competition. After an introduction to the functions of competition law, the teaching goes over the concepts of market definition, the assessment of market power, the agreements that prevent, restrict, or distort competition, the abuse of a dominant position, the merger control procedure and the regulation of state aid. Though European Union Law serves as a basis for the analysis, the necessary links and differences in relation to Swiss Law are also assessed. In sum, this class demonstrates how competition law can restrain anticompetitive activities and promote free competition.
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Trade, Investment and Climate Change
14-15 December 2023
An introduction to the legal concepts and tensions underlying international trade in goods and services as well as investment regarding climate change. The course looks at the discussions at the multilateral level (especially WTO and UNCTAD) as well as some regional and domestic responses to the current challenges (eg. EU). The course, taught by Professor Andreas Ziegler, relies on official documents and thereby familiarises the participants with the language and arguments used in these documents and prepares them for drafting and understanding such documents in the future. It emphasises the importance of the different priorities for different actors and the options for bridging current gaps.
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The Law of Climate Change
7 & 22 December 2023
This course, taught by Professor Joëlle de Sépibus, will focus both on the rationale for the development of international and European climate law, its origins, objectives, principles, legal basis, instruments, and actors. To start with, the course will introduce the science of climate change and describe the geopolitical context in which the international climate change negotiations take place. It will cover, inter alia, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. A particular focus will be placed on issues relating to climate finance, international carbon markets, including REDD+, as well as recent developments in climate negotiations and emerging issues such as loss and damage. Second, the course will explain how international climate negotiations have influenced the EU’s climate and energy policy. It will provide an overview of the evolution of EU climate and energy policy since the 90s and cover the main decarbonization instruments used in the EU, such as the EU ETS, the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), renewable energy, energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage (CCS). It will furthermore focus on the European electricity market design, sustainable transport and highlight the core elements of the circular economy and the EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan, its main objectives and building blocks. Finally, it will address the main challenges raised by adaptation to climate change.
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