Guest Experts of previous courses

Theo van Boven (1934) was UN Special Rapporteur against Torture from December 2001 to December 2004. Earlier he served as Director of Human Rights of the United Nations and was a member of the United Nations Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and of the Committee on the Elimination of Racism and Discrimination. He was also the first Registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He was the Head of the Netherlands delegation to the United Nations Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (Rome, 1998). He was President of the Netherlands Association of International Law; Member of the International Commission of Jurists; and a member of the Board of the International Movement against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism. His education background and honours include: Master of Comparative Law (Dallas, Texas 1960), Doctor of Law (Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1967). He was also a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (1987) and at the New York University Law School (1990). He has written extensively on international human rights and humanitarian law.

Jean-Marc Comment has been working as an IT-Specialist in the Swiss Federal Archives, since 1992. He was head of the IT-Service of the Swiss Federal Archives until 2000. He is now IT Integration-Manager and deputy of the head of the Innovation and Preservation Unit of the Swiss Federal Archives. He was IT-project leader of the Comintern Archives project in Moscow and also general project leader of the project of modernisation of the Albanian Archives. He acts as adviser for digital preservation for the project of the Archives of the National Police of Guatemala. He was also many times in India to share his knowledge with the librarian’s community of this country.

Brandon Hamber is Director of the International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE), an associate site of the United Nations University based at the University of Ulster. He was born in South Africa and currently lives in Belfast. In South Africa he trained as a clinical psychologist and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Ulster. He was a Research Associate of the Belfast-based think-tank, Democratic Dialogue (2001-2006) and an Honorary Fellow at the School of Psychology at the Queen's University in Belfast (2001/2002). He co-ordinated the Transition and Reconciliation Unit at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. He is the Chair of Healing Through Remembering and a Board member of the South African-based Khulumani Victim Support Group. He has consulted to a range of community groups, policy initiatives and government bodies, has lectured and taught widely at different Universities and has published different books.

Keith Krause is Programme Director of the Small Arms Survey, an internationally-recognized research centre NGO he founded in 2001, and also helps coordinate the work of the Geneva Declaration Secretariat. The Small Arms Survey is the main source of information and analysis for international public policy on small arms issues. Keith is also Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland; and Director of its Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding. Keith’s research interests include the changing character of contemporary armed violence, and multilateral security cooperation. He has published Arms and the State (Cambridge) and edited, co-edited or authored several books, journal articles and book chapters. Keith is Canadian, and received his MPhil and DPhil from Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has been a consultant for various international agencies and governments.

Ambassador Jürg Lindenmann, Dr. iur., Attorney-at-law (Berne), is Deputy Director of the Directorate of International Law at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and Head of its Division I (Human Rights and IHL, Diplomatic and Consular Law). He also serves as the Swiss Counterterrorism Coordinator and as Secretary of the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC). Before August 2009, he was the Deputy Legal Advisor of the FDFA and Head of the Unit “Development of International Law” within the Directorate of International Law. Between 1992 and 1999, he had served as legal officer in the International Affairs Division of the Federal Office of Justice. His professional experience relates to a variety of issues concerning general international law, human rights, international criminal law and institutional law. He has been teaching at the University of Fribourg between 2002 and 2009 as well as at the Law Faculty of the University of Lucerne in 2008 and is teaching “The Law of International Organizations” at the University of Berne since 2006.

Abdelhay Moudden, a Moroccan national, received his B.A. from the Faculty of Law at Mohamed V University in Rabat, his M.A. in Political Science from the University of West Florida, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Dr. Moudden has been on the faculty of Mohamed V University in Rabat since 1978, teaching political science and international relations. He has been a Fulbright scholar at the School for International Training and Marlboro College in Vermont, lectured widely around the world, and published a number of professional articles in his fields. Dr. Moudden published two novels in Arabic, one in 1996 and a second in 2003 which won the Moroccan Book Award. Dr. Moudden is a former member Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is currently a member of the Consultative Council for Human Rights.  He is married and has one daughter.

Albrecht Schnabel is a Senior Fellow at the Research Division of the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), where he is engaged in research, policy advice and training with a focus on armed nonstate actors, human security, peace processes and non-traditional roles of armed forces, primarily in the context of security sector reform and governance. He has held research and teaching positions at universities, research institutions and the UN, participated in OSCE election monitoring missions, served as a trainer in conflict prevention for the UN System Staff College and, in 2001-02, as President of the International Association of Peacekeeping Training Centres. He was educated at the University of Munich, the University of Nevada and Queen’s University (Canada), where he received his PhD in 1995. His publications have focussed on ethnic conflict, refugees, armed nonstate actors, human security, security sector reform, early warning, conflict prevention and management, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding, including a co-edited volume on After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities (2007).

Friedrich Schwindt was a career police officer and has been working through rank and file to the position of Polizeidirektor in the Nordrhein-Westfalen Police. His vita includes extended experience as department head at state criminal investigation office level, as deputy chief and director of a major CID, as director of a major Organized Crime Control Bureau, as division commander and senior advisor and as gold commander for serious cases of violent crimes like kidnapping and extortion. He served also as senior lecturer in criminology at the police university in Nordrhein-Westfalen and was twice seconded as director UNMiBH police and director UNMiK police. Since his retirement he is founding partner of a consulting company that is specialized in change management and police reform abroad.