LORD VERDIRAME KC

Verdirame’s career had an unusual start for an academic lawyer. In 1996, he started working with Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond, one of Oxford’s most unorthodox anthropologists and the founder of the University’s Refugee Studies Centre. Harrell-Bond was best known for Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (1986), the first major scholarly study of an international humanitarian programme. In 1997–98, Harrell-Bond and Verdirame received a grant from the Ford Foundation to carry out extensive fieldwork in Africa. Working independently of governments, the UN, and NGOs, they examined how the rights of refugees in Kenya and Uganda were violated in practice by a range of actors, including international organisations and local community leaders.

Their findings were published in Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism (2005),[i] which also drew on research conducted in Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Egypt. The book challenged prevailing assumptions in the humanitarian sector, documenting how refugee protection regimes and aid practices often failed to uphold the rights they claimed to protect. Verdirame later built on this work in a series of publications on the law of international organisations, including The UN and Human Rights: Who Guards the Guardians? (2011),[ii] which won the Biennial Book Award of the Academic Council of the United Nations.

A recurring theme in Verdirame’s work has been a critique of idealised views of international law that gained influence in Western academic and policy circles after the Cold War. He has argued that these views are often detached from history and insufficiently attentive to politics, strategy, and interests, yet they have shaped Western policy and the development of international institutions since the 1990s.

In his writings Verdirame has highlighted tensions between post-1990s liberal internationalism and the classical liberal tradition.[iii] He was among the few academic lawyers to criticise the Convention on the Future of Europe chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, arguing that it was an unsuitable process for constitutional law-making. Writing in 2003, he warned of a growing gap between political elites and wider society, cautioning against what he described as the “hubris of European elites” pursuing an ambitious constitutional vision without popular consent. In other work, he has also examined the complex relationship between international law and the ‘grand strategy’ of peace, and questioned the Whiggish narratives that inform most modern-day historical and legal accounts on the relationship between law, and the international peace and security.[iv]

Verdirame has also criticised expansive interpretations of human rights treaties, particularly in their application to armed conflict, arguing that they risk undermining the human rights project itself.[v] In 2012-2014, together with Jacob Mchangama, he was awarded a large grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a project on re-grounding human rights in the idea of freedom, which led to further work in international political and legal theory,[vi] as well as to a book in progress on the future of political liberty (Can Liberty Last?).

A graduate of the University of Bologna, Guglielmo Verdirame completed a PhD at the London School of Economics in 2001. In 2000-2003, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford before moving to Cambridge as a University Lecturer in Public International Law, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. Since 2010 he has been a professor (part-time since 2015) at the Department of War Studies at King’s College. He has been a visiting professorial fellow at Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at Columbia Law School. Over the years, Lord Verdirame has also been a regular contributor to Policy Exchange, writing on armed conflict, human rights, Brexit, and the ICC.[vii]

Alongside his academic career, Verdirame has practised at the Bar since 2006. He regularly appears as counsel before international courts and tribunals, including the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS Annex VII tribunals, the European Court of Human Rights, and investment treaty tribunals. He currently acts for Ukraine in its case against Russia before the ECHR concerning human rights violations following Russia’s invasion in February 2022. He has also represented the United Kingdom in proceedings before the ICJ in Marshall Islands v UK, Italy in the Enrica Lexie dispute before both ITLOS and an arbitral tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and Rwanda in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in a dispute against the UK under the migration partnership.

[i] G. Verdirame and B. E. Harrell-Bond (foreword by Justice Albie Sachs), Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (2005), xxix +385.

[ii] The United Nations and Human Rights: Who Guards the Guardians?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2011) lvi +448.

[iii] E.g: G. Verdirame, ‘Are Liberal Internationalists Still Liberal?’ in C. Giorgetti and G. Verdirame (eds.), Whither the West? International Law in Europe and the United States, ASIL Studies in International Legal Theory, Cambridge University Press, (2021), pp. 53-72.

[iv] E.g.: ‘The Sinews of Peace: International Law, Strategy and the Prevention of War’, 78 British Year Book of International Law (2006) 83-162.

[v] E.g: G. Verdirame,  ‘Rescuing Human Rights from Proportionality’, in Rowan Cruft, S. Matthew Liao, Massimo Renzo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights Oxford University Press, (2015) 341-360; J. Mchangama and G. Verdirame, ‘The Danger of Proliferation: When Defending Liberty, Less is More’, Foreign Affairs (online), 24 July 2013; ‘Human Rights in War: A Framework for Analysis’, [2008] European Human Rights Law Review 6: 689-705.

[vi] E.g.: J. Tasioulas and G. Verdirame, ‘Philosophy of International Law’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.); G. Verdirame, ‘International Law’ in J. Tasioulas (ed.) Cambridge Handbook to Legal Philosophy, Cambridge University Press (2020), pp. 389-408.

[vii] Contributions to the work of Policy Exchange include The Ottawa Treaty and Convention on Cluster Munitions: Can we still afford them? (2025), State or Diplomatic Immunity and the Limits of International Criminal Law (2025), The International Criminal Court Act 2001 and State or Diplomatic Immunity (2024), A Second Look (2019), Strengthening the UK’s position on the Backstop (2019) and How to Exit the Backstop (2018).