A Swedish Practitioner's Perspective on the Practice of Public International Law

Speaker: Dr Erik O. Wennerström
Chair: Dr Martins Paparinskis (UCL Laws)

About this talk:

The obligation of the EU to accede to the ECHR (art. 6 TEU), the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention, and the Kampala amendments to the Rome Statute of the ICC (art. 8). As pieces of international law these three have next to nothing in common, apart from being treaty-based. The states and agents drafting and implementing them, however, will occasionally be identical, adding their particularities to the fate of the treaty provisions. This presentation will present some examples of international law practice, bearing witness to the challenge of combining political imperatives with loyalty to legal principles.

About the speaker: 

Dr. Erik O. Wennerström is a lawyer, legal scholar, civil servant and former diplomat from Sweden. He holds a LL.M. and a LL.D. from Uppsala University. He joined the Swedish Foreign Service in 1990, and in 1996 the European Commission as an official in the area of Justice and Home Affairs. In 2000, he returned to Stockholm to work with EU-affairs at the Ministry of Justice. In 2007, Wennerström was appointed Principal Legal Adviser with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, a position he held until 2012 when he was appointed Director-General and head of the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, a government agency for judicial statistics and analysis, a position he currently holds. During the negotiations for EU accession to the ECHR, he was the observer of the Council of Europe's committee on international law to the negotiations.

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