Born in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1973, Samantha Besson holds Swiss and British nationality. She is a professor at the Collège de France in Paris and has held the Chair in International Law of Institutions since 2019. She has also been a professor of public international law and European law at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) since 2005.
Samantha Besson studied law in Switzerland, Austria and the United Kingdom between 1991 and 1999. Following her PhD, she held the positions of visiting postdoctoral researcher at Columbia Law School in New York (1999–2000) and Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford (2001–2004). Since then, she has also been a visiting professor at the universities of Zurich (2007–2010), Lausanne (2010) and Lisbon (2010–2019), as well as at the law schools of Duke (2009), Harvard (2014) and the University of Pennsylvania (2019). Samantha Besson has also taught in various capacities at The Hague Academy of International Law since 2009. She was invited to deliver a special course there in January 2020 and the general course in July 2027. She was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2011–12 and a member of the scientific council of the Institut d’études avancées de Nantes from 2013 to 2021. In 2021, she was awarded the rank of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by France and, in 2024, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Catholic University of Louvain for her work on sovereignty.
In 2021, Samantha Besson was elected a member of the Institute of International Law, where she serves as co-rapporteur of the 10th Commission on ‘Distributive Justice and Equity in International Law’. From 2021 to 2024, she co-chaired the International Law Association’s (ILA) working group on the international law of regional organisations (2021–2024). Samantha Besson regularly advises the Swiss Government on various issues relating to its foreign, European and security policy. Since 2024, she has been one of the Swiss members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Between 2008 and 2011, she served on the Swiss Federal Commission against Racism as an independent member. Since 2017, she has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences and was the first Human Rights Delegate for the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences (2013–2016).
Samantha Besson’s research interests lie at the intersection of general international law, European institutional law and the philosophy of law. Her areas of specialisation and particular interest are the theory and international, European and comparative law of human rights, and international and European democracy.
