Louise Doswald-Beck is a Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. She was formerly Director of its predecessor, the University Center for International Humanitarian Law.
Initially a lecturer at the Universities of Exeter and London, between 1987 and 2001 she was a legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross and became Head of the Legal Division in 1998. At the ICRC, she acted in negotiations leading to various international instruments: the Statute of the International Criminal Court and its Elements of Crimes, Protocols II and IV of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the Ottawa Convention on Anti-Personnel Landmines, and Protocol II to the Hague Convention on Cultural Property. She won the Ciardi Prize for co-authoring the ICRC Study on Customary International Humanitarian Law.