PhD candidates

Christiane Ahlborn

Christiane is a PhD candidate in the SHARES Project.

She is writing her thesis on the topic of responsibility of member states for action in the framework of international organizations. Her research seeks to identify the legal bases to hold member States responsible for internationally wrongful acts committed in the framework of international organizations. Against the background of the work of the UN International Law Commission on the responsibility of States and international organizations, she examines the conditions as well as the content and implementation of the responsibility of member States of international organizations. Christiane is also a Co-rapporteur of the International Law Association’s (ILA) Study Group on the Responsibility of International Organizations. She is currently an Associate Legal Officer at the UN and Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna.

Before joining SHARES, she completed her Master’s degree in International Law (M.I.S./LL.M.) at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, including an exchange semester at Harvard Law School. After her undergraduate studies in law and international relations (B.A. excellent with honors) at the University of Dresden, Germany, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques Strasbourg, France, she worked as a junior consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva, Switzerland. She has further work experience with the German Development Cooperation (GTZ; now: GIZ) in Rwanda and Human Rights Watch in New York.

Blogposts by Christiane Ahlborn

• Adjudicating Somali Piracy Cases – German Courts in a Double Bind
• ‘Joint Responsibility in International Law: Revisiting the Oil Platforms Case’, A Comment on Bruno Simma’s SHARES Lecture
• UNESCO Approves Palestinian Membership Bid: A Case for US Countermeasures Against the Organization?
• Expert Seminar on Shared Responsibility in International Refugee Law – In Search for a Legal Basis of Burden-Sharing

Publications by Christiane Ahlborn

• To Share or Not to Share? The Allocation of Responsibility between International Organizations and their Member States
• The Use of Analogies in Drafting the Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations – An Appraisal of the ‘Copy-Paste Approach’ –
• The Rules of International Organizations and the Law of International Responsibility