Chair of European and International Law

The YSU Chair of European and International Law was founded in 2006 with the support of the "ECEILAW" program of the European Union. Before the establishment of the Chair, the educational programs for the subjects taught by the Chair were prepared and taught by the Chair of Constitutional Law of YSU. Aghasi Yesayan taught the subject "International Law" at the YSU Faculty of Law back in 1950.

Candidate of Legal science, Associate Professor V. Kocharyan was the head of the Chair in 2006-2015, and in 2015-2022, Doctor of Legal science; Professor V. Stepanyan led the Chair.

For the 2023-2024 academic year, the Chair has created a new Master's educational program "International Courts and Arbitration".

The program aims to acquaint students with the principles and basics of International Law, to provide in-depth and comprehensive knowledge of international courts and arbitration proceedings, as well as to teach students to analyze the problems and issues related to the theory and practice of International Law, to present the role, activities, and characteristics of different instances of international legal dispute settlement, to understand the different stages of international legal dispute settlement, to interpret the common and distinctive features of domestic and International Law and to evaluate the role of domestic law in the international legal dispute settlement process, as well as to develop written and oral argumentation skills.

Theorists, as well as experienced specialists of legislative, executive, and judicial bodies and professionals with long experience in the field, are involved in the Chair.

The Chair's representatives are members of many organizations of domestic and International Law, including: "The International Law Association", "American Bar Association", "Pennsylvania Bar Association", European Club, International Human Rights and Democratization "Global Campus", RA Lawyers' Association, Armenian Association of International Law, etc.

The primary directions of the Chair's scientific research are the issues of realizing the right of nations and peoples to self-determination, the international legal issue of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, the international legal protection of human rights, legal issues of EU-Armenian cooperation, current issues of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, etc.

The department also worked on the creation of educational literature in the native language, in particular, the textbook "International Law", "International Legal and Domestic Protection of Refugees", "Practice of the European Court of Human Rights" and other educational manuals and lecture texts were published.

In the Chair of European and International Law, work is being done in the direction of staff preparation and training. Chair members have received training in the leading scientific centers of the USA, Europe, and Russia. Practical cooperation with many foreign scientific centers and educational programs is established. Continuous work is being done to update courses and curricula and introduce new teaching methods.

Within the scientific activity of the Chair, doctoral and candidate theses were defended, and many scientific articles, monographs as well as summaries of conferences were published.

Many of the Chair's members have lectured as invited specialists at many universities and research centers in Western Europe and the USA. The teaching staff of the Chair of European and International Law constantly participates in international educational and research events on current issues of International Law, actively presenting reports as well. In recent years, active work has been carried out to study the problems of refugee rights protection, as a result of which a Refugee Law school is organized every year within the framework of cooperation with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and "Mission Armenia" NGO. Chair members also teach at the YSU Faculty of International Relations.

Due to the direct guidance and training of European and International Law Chair’s professionals, student teams of the Faculty of Law regularly participate in international moot competitions for law students, such as: "Philip Jessup Moot", "Nuremberg Moot Court", "The Nelson Mandela World Human Rights Moot Court" and so on.

The Chair works by its complex development plan.