Lighting Up New Stars // HSE Team is The Vice-Champion of The Jessup Russia Competition
On 28 February 2021, the Final Round of the Russian National Championship of the Jessup Competition, one of the most prestigious law competitions globally, was held online. The HSE University (Moscow) team appeared in the Final Round of the National Championship for the second year in a row , and came as a Russian Runner-Up team, after the acting champions, the MGIMO team.
The Competition, as well as the Russian National Championship, are being held online this year. There were 27 teams in total participating in the Russian Nationals. This means, that if the Competition was held off-line, HSE team would have been representing Russia at the international rounds held annually in Washington D.C. for the sixth year in a row, which is an unprecedented consistency among all Russian teams.
This result has come against all odds for the HSE team. There are only 3 people on the team this year, and the oralists of the HSE team are completely new:
- Ekaterina Shygaeva, 2nd year master’s student at “Private international law”;
- Alexander Kozhedub, 4th year bachelor student),
- Alyona Ilchenko, 3rd year bachelor student.
Coaches of the team this year are Gayane Gulyan, HSE law alumna class of 2018, and Matvey Tarasov, 2nd year master’s student at “Law of International Trade, Finance, and Economic Integration”.
The Final Round of the Russian National Championship was traditionally chaired by a panel of three outstanding judges:
Mark Luz – General Counsel for the Trade Law Bureau, Global Affairs Canada, and the current Chair of ILSA;
Alka Pradhan – Board member of ILSA and a Human Rights Counsel at the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions; and
Sergey Usoskin – international arbitration and cross-border disputes specialist, acting arbitrator and expert on Russian and international law issues. Sergey represented Russia in cases before the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Jessup in Russia. HSE team has been participating in the Russian National Championship of the Jessup Competition since 2012. The founder of the Jessup team in HSE as we know it today was Ksenia Kapranova, alumna of the Nizhniy Novgorod branch of HSE who coached the team for three years. A special award given annually in Russia was named after her honoring people for outstanding contribution to the development of the Jessup Russia and the Jessup in general. We are happy that this year the award went to Emil Shagiakhmetov, HSE law alumnus class of 2014, former participant and coach of the HSE Jessup team for many years (until 2020). Congratulations to Emil!
The Philip C. Jessup International Law Competition was founded in 1959 and has been held annually since then as a moot court competition (in English) touching upon a fictitious inter-state case brought before the International Court of Justice. Currently, Jessup Competition is the largest and one of the most famous and prestigious moot court competitions in the world. More than 3,000 law students from more than 700 universities and 100 countries worldwide annually participate in this game. Despite the remote format of the competition this year, the numbers have remained the same.
The Jessup 2021 Problem concerns a global pandemic, and the obligations and responses of States with respect to the outbreak. It also involves questions of the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, a desperate claim for political asylum by an alleged rogue scientist, and State responsibility for a suspicious aircraft explosion.
The next stage of the Competition, i.e., the international rounds, will be held remotely from 15 March to 17 April 2021. Congratulations to the team and coaches on their outstanding achievements at the Russian Rounds and Best of Luck at the international rounds!