On 14 September, UNIDROIT was invited to participate in an International Conference entitled “China’s Belt and Road Initiative – Opportunities and Challenges for International Dispute Resolution and Contracting” (Hamburg 13-15 September). The conference was a celebratory event organised on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the CEAC (Chinese European Arbitration Centre), by its Managing Director Professor Eckart Brödermann. Deputy Secretary-General Professor Anna Veneziano participated as co-moderator for two panels, one entitled “Common Law and Civil Law Perspective of the UNDROIT Principles”, with panellists Roger E. Barton (US), Mohamed Hossam Loutfi (Egypt), Dharshini Prasad (UK), Prof. Jingxia Shi (China, UNIDROIT Governing Council Member), Prof. Stefan Vogenauer (Germany), Prof. Gerhard Wegen (Germany), and another on the “Interaction between the CISG and the UNIDROIT Principles – a hot topic for China related contracts”, with panelists Angelo Anglani (Italy), Prof. Lauro Gama (Brazil), Prof. Ingeborg Schwenzer (Switzerland), and Prof. Bruno Zeller (Australia)
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| Shot of conference room | Professor Anna Veneziano and Professor Eckart Brödermann |
Matthias Lehmann is a professor of Private, Private International and Comparative Law at the University of Vienna. His main interest is the cross-border aspect of banking and financial law, both from a regulatory and from a private law viewpoint. He is regularly a guest professor in various universities, including Sorbonne University, where he teaches a class on the crypto economy. He has been visiting academic at the London School of Economics and Political Science, at Oxford University and at Stanford University, and is regularly invited as a guest professor at various European Universities, including Sorbonne University (France), where he teaches a class on the law and regulation of crypto markets. Matthias is a member of the Council European Law Institute, the American Law Institute, the Academia Europaea and of the Academic Council of the European Banking Institute. He was a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Conflict of Laws Regarding Securities and Claims, and has worked with the UK Financial Markets Law Committee. He has been an observer to the UNIDROIT working group, digital assets and private law. Currently, he is a member of the UNIDROIT Working Groups on bank insolvency and verified carbon credits.
Charles W. Mooney, Jr. Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School; J.D. (cum laude) Harvard Law School; B.A. (High Honors) University of Oklahoma; Partner Shearman & Sterling (1981-86). He is a leading legal scholar in the fields of commercial law and bankruptcy law. His book (with the late Steven Harris), Security Interests in Personal Property, is a widely adopted text used in law schools around the United States. Mooney was honored for his contributions to the uniform law process by the Oklahoma City University School of Law. The American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers awarded Mooney the Distinguished Service Award, the Grant Gilmore Award in recognition of superior writing in the field of commercial finance law, and the Harry C. Sigman Special Award for leadership on the 2022 UCC Amendments. Mooney also served as a Co-Reporter for the Drafting Committee for the Revision of UCC Article 9 (Secured Transactions) (1990-2000), as Reporter for the Revision of the UCC (Emerging Technologies, including new Article 12) (2021-22), as the ABA Liaison-Advisor to the Permanent Editorial Board for the UCC, and as a member of Council and Chair of the Committee on UCC of the ABA Business Law Section. He is a Fellow and former Director of the American College of Bankruptcy and American College of Commercial Finance Attorneys, and a member and former director, vice-president, and member of the Executive Committee of the International Insolvency Institute (III). Mooney served as a member of UNIDROIT Working Group on Digital Assets, head of III delegation to UNCITRAL Working Group VI (secured transactions), and as a U.S. Delegate at the Diplomatic Conferences for the UNIDROIT Leasing Convention, Cape Town Convention (Aircraft and MAC Protocols), and Geneva Securities Convention.
Professor Dr. Matthias Haentjens holds the chair for civil law at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He also practices law as advocaat at De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek. He has been a deputy judge in the commercial law division of the Court of Amsterdam from 2019-2025.
Ms. Elsie Addo Awadzi is a Visiting Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She is a multi-disciplinary professional with 30 years of professional experience working in various capacities in Africa and internationally. Her experience spans economic governance, international financial institutions, financial services regulation, and crisis management. Until recently, she served as a Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana for seven years, where she led major reforms that helped to strengthen the banking system, including navigating it through a systemic banking crisis and a public debt restructuring exercise. Before then, she was Senior Counsel, Financial and Fiscal Law at the IMF, where she worked for six years helping several IMF member countries design and implement effective banking regulatory and crisis management frameworks, and fiscal governance frameworks. Before her IMF role, she held various portfolios in Ghana, including as a Commissioner of Ghana’s Securities & Exchange Commission for six years, where she played a key role in designing policies, rules, surveillance, and enforcement mechanisms for Ghana’s then-nascent capital market. She also consulted extensively for local and foreign businesses, private equity/venture capital funds, public sector clients, and development partners. Her earlier career saw her working in corporate law and a brief stint in bank treasury operations. She holds academic qualifications from Georgetown University Law Center (LL.M with Distinction in International Business & Economic Law 2012); University of Ghana Business School (M.B.A. Finance 2000), the Ghana School of Law (Qualifying Certificate in Law 1995), and the University of Ghana Law Faculty (LL.B 1993).
Dr Ole Böger is a Judge in Banking and Criminal matters at the Hanseatic Court of Appeal (Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht) in Bremen, Germany, and a Lecturer at the University of Bremen. Since 2022, he is a Correspondent of UNIDROIT for Germany. Previously, he has been, amongst others, a Desk Officer at the German Federal Ministry of Justice and for Consumer Protection (2013-2016), a Legal Officer at UNIDROIT working on the Principles of Close-Out Netting (2012-2013) and a research assistant at the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and Comparative Private Law in Hamburg, Germany (2003-2008). He has represented the German government in UNCITRAL Working Groups and at UNIDROIT, specifically in the preparation and adoption of the MAC Protocol to the Cape Town Convention, and he is an Ex officio Observer to the Preparatory Commission for the Establishment of the International Registry for MAC equipment, as well as a member of the Commission of Experts to the Supervisory Authority of the Luxembourg Rail Protocol. Recently, he has been an external consultant to secured transactions law reform projects of the World Bank in Suriname (2016), Greece (2020) and Lebanon (2021). Dr Böger holds law degrees of the University of Göttingen in Germany and King’s College London (UK) and he has authored numerous publications with a focus on international secured transactions law and the law of payment services.
Megumi Hara is Professor of Law at Chuo University, Tokyo, where she teaches property law, contract law, secured transactions, and trust law. Her research focuses on asset-based finance and the conceptual structure of property rights. Before joining Chuo, she taught at Kyushu University and Gakushuin University and has also given courses at the University of Tokyo and Keio University.
Dr Janis Sarra 
Neil B. Cohen, 1901 Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, has been a key participant in major domestic and international law reform projects with respect to commercial transactions for over three decades. In the United States, he has served as Reporter for Revised Article 1 of the Uniform Commercial Code and for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law of Suretyship and Guaranty; in honor of his accomplishments as Reporter for the Restatement, he was named as the Institute’s R. Ammi Cutter Reporter. Professor Cohen also was the U.S. Reporter for the recently promulgated Principles of Law for the Data Economy, a joint project of the American Law Institute and the European Law Institute. He has served as Director of Research of the Permanent Editorial Board for the Uniform Commercial Code since 1998. Internationally, Professor Cohen has long experience in the modernization and harmonization of commercial law. He has served as a member of United States delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law for its work on harmonizing and modernizing the law of secured credit, as a member of the Working Group at the Hague Conference on Private International Law that prepared its Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts and as a member of two current Expert Groups, and as a Working Group member for the work of UNIDROIT in its development of principles for international contracts and for enforcement of claims and for its preparation of the Model Law on Factoring. Since 2009, he has been a member of the United States Department of State’s Advisory Committee on Private International Law. Professor Cohen is a co-author of Farnsworth, Sanger, Cohen, Brooks and Garvin, Contracts: Cases and Materials and of Twerski and Cohen, Choice of Law: Cases and Materials for a Concise Course on Conflict of Laws as well as dozens of other books and articles concerning domestic and international commercial law. Professor Cohen received an S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden Scholar.
Professor Iacopo Donati is the UNIDROIT/Bank of Italy Chair Holder and is mainly responsible for assisting in the Bank Insolvency project. He is Professor of Corporate and Insolvency Law at the University of Siena, and coordinates the research project ‘Pro.Re.Ba.’ (Proportionating rules on bank crisis prevention and management to the case of retail banks), which has received funding from the Italian Ministry of University. He has previously taught corporate law at the University of Venice ‘Ca’ Foscari’, at the University of Florence and at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’.
rtered Institute of Arbitrators (London). He further holds a post-graduate diploma in law from the Kenya School of Law. Allan is also a scholar from the Hague Academy of International Law.
rofessor Ignacio Tirado was appointed Secretary-General by the Governing Council at its 97th session, and officially took office on 27 August 2018. A national of Spain, Professor Tirado (Commercial, Corporate and Insolvency Law, Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, Spain) holds a PhD from the Universities of Bologna and Autónoma de Madrid and an LLM from the University of London. Professor Tirado has been a Senior Legal Consultant at the World Bank’s Legal Vice-Presidency and Financial Sector Practice for more than nine years, having also consulted for the IMF on insolvency related matters as well as for the Asian Development Bank on commercial legal reform.
A Swedish national, Ms Lena Peters grew up in Italy where she attended an English school. In 1978 she took her Juris Kandidatexamen at Stockholm University followed by a Master of Laws from King’s College, London (1979). Since 1985 she has been with UNIDROIT, first as Research Officer, lastly as Principal Legal Officer, her main duties being Secretary to the Working Group for the Preparation of Principles of International Commercial Contracts, Secretary to the Study Group on Franchising, Secretary to the Committee of Governmental Experts on Franchising.She also collaborated on the project for the preparation of the ELI-Unidroit Model European Rules of Civil Procedure. She is currently Managing Editor of the Uniform Law Review and responsible for publications at UNIDROIT.
Marina Schneider is Principal Legal Officer and Treaty Depositary at UNIDROIT. She studied law at the University of Strasbourg (France) and Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne. She joined the UNIDROIT in 1987 and was involved in the elaboration and French versions of most UNIDROIT instruments since. She is in charge of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects and of the UNESCO-UNIDROIT Model Provisions on State Ownership of Undiscovered Cultural Objects. She is the author of the Explanatory Report of the 1995 Convention and many articles on the Convention and other international instruments in the field. Ms Schneider is also responsible for the project on private collections and for the UNIDROIT Convention Academic Project (UCAP). She is member of the Board of the International Society for Research on Art and Cultural Heritage Law (ISCHAL).
Professor of Commercial Law, Carlos III University of Madrid. Currently, Sir Roy Goode Scholar at UNIDROIT, Rome, 2021-2022. Chair of Excellence 2017-2018 at University of Oxford (Uc3m- Santander Program), affiliated to Harris Manchester College. Previously Distinguished Visiting Professor and fellow of a number of Academic Institutions. Arbitrator of Madrid Court of Arbitration. Member of ELI (European Law Institute) Council and Executive Committee. Member of the Expert Group of the European Commission on Liability and New Technologies and member of the Expert Group of the European Observatory of Platform Economy; the International Academy of Commercial and Consumer Law; the expert group of the Inclusive Global Legal Innovation Platform for Online Dispute Resolution – UNCITRAL and Hong Kong Department of Justice. Expert of the UNIDROIT Study Group on the MAC Protocol of the Cape Town Convention on International Interests. Delegate of Spain to UNIDROIT for the adoption of the Protocol, delegate of Spain in Working Group VI of UNCITRAL on secured transactions and in Working Group IV on Electronic Commerce. Member of UNIDROIT Working Groups on Enforcement and Warehouse Receipts.
William Brydie-Watson is an Australian lawyer who specialises in secured transactions law and private international law. Before joining UNIDROIT, William was a government lawyer in the Private International Law and International Arbitration section of the Australian Attorney-General’s Department, where he worked primarily on treaty negotiation and the implementation of private international law treaties in Australia. At UNIDROIT, he is primarily responsible for the implementation of the Mining, Agriculture and Construction (MAC Protocol) to the 2001 Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment and the development of a Model Law on Factoring. William also serves as UNIDROIT’s liaison with the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and as manager of the Institute’s Scholarship and Internship Programme. Admitted to practice in New South Wales and the High Court of Australia, he has a Bachelor of Arts (honours), a Bachelor of Laws and a Master of Laws from the Australian National University. William also lectures on International Secured Transactions Law at the Eotvos Lorand Faculty of Law in Budapest.