Lucio Gussetti

Italian, I studied at Trieste University from where I hold a Degree in Law.

The main areas of my professional career have been essentially in the legal sector of public Institutions and government, focussing initially on Italian internal rules of their functioning (what in Europe we define as Administrative Law) and later on the activity of the European Union, in particular in its relations with the world and the protection of Human Rights and Freedoms.

In the over 30 years of activity as EU official my main domain of action has been on International Law applied to EU Law, whose main legal challenges concern the nature of the EU as an independent actor on the international sphere – including but not limited to negotiations of international agreements and treaties -and the constitutional relations between the EU and its Member States.

I represented the EU in court actions before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and before the WTO Dispute Settlement bodies in Geneva; I supervised my team’s judicial actions or interventions on behalf of the EU before foreign and international Courts such as the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the US Supreme Court.

I have represented the EU for over 10 years in the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee in New York and in the Council of Europe Commission for Democracy through Law in Venice.

I hold significant experience as advisor at government level, for example to the President of the European Commission in Brussels or to a Regional Minister in Trieste.

I finally have a significant experience in the legal aspects of Foreign Policy, which will be the focus of my research at Yale.