Born in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1973, of Swiss and British nationality, Samantha Besson is Professor at the Collège de France, Paris, and holds the International Law of InstitutionsChair since 2019. She has also been 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 UK between 1991 and 1999. After completing her doctorate, she held the positions of Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia Law School in New York (1999-2000) and Junior Research Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford University (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 Duke Law School (2009), Harvard Law School (2014) and Pennsylvania University (2019). Samantha Besson has also taught in various capacities at The Hague Academy of International Law since 2009. She was invited to give a special lecture there in January 2020 and the general lecture in July 2027. She was a resident of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2011-12 and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institut d'études avancées de Nantes from 2013 to 2021. In 2021, she was awarded the Chevalière de la Légion d'Honneur by France and, in 2024, received an honorarydoctorate from the Catholic University of Louvain for her work on sovereignty.
In 2021, Samantha Besson was elected associate member of the Institut de droit international, where she is co-apporteur of the 10th Commission on international distributive justice. From 2021 to 2024, she co-chaired the International Law Association (ILA) Working Group on the International Law of Regional Organizations (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 was an independent member of the Swiss Federal Commission against Racism. Since 2017, she has sat on the committee of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences and was the first delegate for human rights of the Swiss Academies of Sciences (2013-2016).
Samantha Besson's research interests lie at the crossroads of general international law, European institutional law and legal philosophy. Her areas of specialization and predilection are the theory and international, European and comparative law of human rights and international and European democracy.