Three LLM students will represent the Geneva Academy at the 30th Edition of the Jean-Pictet Competition

12 December 2017

Three students of our LLM in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights – Yasmin Afina, Guillem Adrià Puri Plana and Noa Schreuer – will represent the Geneva Academy at the 30th Edition of the Jean-Pictet Competition that will take in Ohrid, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, from 24 to 31 March 2018.

They are coached by George Dvaladze, former Teaching Assistant at the Geneva Academy and PhD candidate at the Law Faculty of the University of Geneva.

For this edition, the Committee for the Jean-Pictet Competition received 86 applications and selected 32 Anglophone and 16 Francophone teams for the final rounds. The Geneva Academy’s team will participate in the Anglophone group of the Competition.

Putting the Law into Practice

The Jean-Pictet Competition is an important part of the professionalizing training on international humanitarian law (IHL) and human rights offered by the LLM at the Geneva Academy. ‘Alongside the academic courses on the law applicable in armed conflicts, participation in the competition offers students a unique opportunity to take the law out of the books’ stresses George Dvaladze.

As he also underlines in an article in the International Committee of the Red Cross Law and Policy Blog ‘apart from tremendous experiential learning, IHL competitions also give young students a chance to expand their professional circles and embrace careers in those fields afterwards’.

Successful Participation

The Geneva Academy has been successfully participating in the Jean-Pictet Competition for the past few years by winning the competition in 2016 and reaching the semi-finals in 2017.

Our alumni have also participated in the competition in different roles, such as members of the organizing committee, jury members and tutors.