Faculty support for mooting event at the Peace Palace

Judging panel members Bojana Ristic, Fergus Whyte and Sebastian King (seated) with members of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and University of Warsaw teams in the Small Hall of Justice in the Peace Palace.

FACULTY member Fergus Whyte recently acted as a judge in a mooting event hosted by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the Hague.

The PCA is one of the oldest international dispute resolution bodies in the world and is housed in the Peace Palace in the Hague. It shares this historic building with the International Court of Justice.

“It was an immense privilege to be able to act as a mooting judge in so phenomenal a setting as the Peace Palace,” said Mr Whyte. “The quality of the teams, from so many different countries, was impressively high. The organisers at the Permanent Court of Arbitration also did a fantastic job as hosts. It remains a great pleasure to continue to be involved in judging the Vis Moot and, as ever, a good chance to look at legal arguments from a different perspective.” 

 

The event was a preparatory event for the Willem C Vis Moot which takes place in Vienna each year and involves hundreds of teams from universities around the world. This year marked the 30^th anniversary of the Willem C Vis Moot.

Mr Whyte was joined by several other judges at the PCA event, which saw teams from 21 different universities competing against each other, including a team from the London School of Economics and Political Science. First prize eventually went to the University of Sydney team.

He is a former coach of the University of Edinburgh’s Vis Moot team with which a number of other members of Faculty and devils have also assisted in the past. This involved helping students with written and oral pleadings as well as accompanying them to premoots across Europe and to the competition in Vienna.