Professor Ady Schonmann-Bethlehem

Biography

Ady Schonmann-Bethlehem is a Visiting Professor in the Dickson Poon School of Law and in the Department of War Studies. She is also a Senior Research Fellow and Affiliated Faculty in the Transnational Law Institute (TLI) of The Dickson Poon School of Law. She is a London-based lawyer specialising in international law and a consultant with Legal Policy International Ltd (LPI), a specialist consultancy on high legal content policy matters.  In parallel with her consultancy work, she teaches graduate courses on United Nations law and has convened a Visiting Speaker Series entitled "Practitioners in the Hot Seat - Legal Challenges in a Transnational World", which was co-hosted by The Department of War Studies and the Law School TLI pathway. She is currently teaching LLM modules on The United Nations Collective Security System: When Theory Meets Practice as well as on The Law and Practice of the United Nations: Edging Towards Transnational Constitutionalism?

Before moving to London in February 2014, Ady Schonmann-Bethlehem was for four years the Legal Adviser to the Israeli Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York.  In this capacity, she represented Israel in the UN General Assembly, UN Security Council and the Sixth (Legal) Committee of the General Assembly, as well as in its engagements with the UN Office of Legal Affairs and other offices of the UN Secretariat.  She also represented Israel as an observer in the meetings of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as well as in other international bodies.

Prior to her move to New York in December 2009, Ady Schonmann-Bethlehem was the Deputy Head of the International Law Department in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem and a member of the Israeli negotiating team with the Palestinians.  In these roles, she advised on Israel’s human rights and humanitarian law commitments and the formulation of its policies in these fields.  During this period, she represented Israel in the UN Human Rights Council, including in its Universal Periodic Review proceedings, as well as in and before other UN human rights bodies and organs in both Geneva and New York.  As a member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians, she was involved in various aspects of the Middle East Peace Process over 17 years, including in the preparation of Israel’s negotiating position with the Palestinians and with Lebanon.  She has lectured on issues ranging from Israel's relationship with the United Nations to the concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the UN human rights system and international human rights law and terrorism. In 2014, as a visiting professor at Columbia University Law School in New York, she taught a graduate course on The Legal Theory and Practice of the United Nations.

Areas of Expertise

• Public International Law
• The law and practice of the United Nations
• International human rights law
• United Nations collective security system

Research Interests

• The law, practice and procedure of the United Nations
• UNGA Emergency Special Sessions
• Semantics and linguistics in international law
• Aesthetics and international law
• Cyber challenges under international law