Otto Spijkers
Assistant Professor of International and European Law, Leiden University College, Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University
Otto Spijkers is an international law scholar whose work centers on the role of the United Nations in global governance and on how shared moral values are translated into international law. He is an assistant professor of international and European law at Leiden University College, part of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs at Leiden University, and he also teaches international law at Amsterdam University College. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, The United Nations, the Evolution of Global Values and International Law, at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden University; it was published by Intersentia in 2011. That book argues that global values shaped the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the development of its purposes and principles, and that the organization plays a central part in defining those values and giving them legal form. His Mondial article, The United Nations as a Values-based Community (June 2019), draws directly on this research. Before returning to the Netherlands, he was a professor of international law at Wuhan University, China, where he worked with its China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies and its Research Institute of Environmental Law, was a founding staff member of its International Water Law Academy, and served as managing editor of the Chinese Journal of Environmental Law. Earlier he was a researcher at Utrecht University in the fields of water, oceans, and the law of the sea. His broader expertise spans international and European law, the law of the sea, international water law, and environmental law.
