Professor Evangelos Raftopoulos is Professor Emeritus of International Law and International Environmental Law at Panteion University of Athens, Greece, and the Founding Director of the MEPIELAN Centre (Mediterranean Programme for International Environmental Law and Negotiation). He is also a Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy, and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG) at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019, he has served as an elected Member of the Compliance Committee of the Barcelona Convention and as Vice-Chair (2022–2024), and since 2017, as a Member of the World Commission on Environmental Law (WCEL) of the IUCN. He is Editor and Director of the MEPIELAN E-Bulletin.
From 1987 to 2010, he was a special legal adviser to the Mediterranean Action Plan/United Nations Environment Programme (MAP/UNEP) and also served as an international legal advisor to the Greek Minister of Housing, Public Works, and the Environment (1983–1985). Lawyer of the Athens Bar Association until 2012 and founding educational counselor of the Institute of Continual Training, National Centre of Public Administration (1985-1993), Professor Raftopoulos has participated in over 70 international environmental conferences since 1983. He holds a PhD in International Law (PhD Cantab) and an LLM (LLM Cantab) from the University of Cambridge, as well as a first class Law Degree from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He was a Ford Foundation Southern European Fellow in International Law at Yale Law School (1980–1982) and has lectured extensively across Greek, European, American, and Canadian academic institutions.
Author of 13 books, numerous articles, book chapters, and international reports, Professor Raftopoulos’s major works include: International Negotiation: A Process of Relational Governance for International Common Interest (Cambridge University Press, 2019; Contributions to International Environmental Negotiation in the Mediterranean Context (E. Raftopoulos – M. McConnell, eds.) (Ant. N. Sakkoulas – Bruylant Publishers, Athens, 2004 – Nomiki Bibliothiki (new edit.), Athens, 2014); Studies on the Implementation of the Barcelona Convention : The Development of an International Trust Regime (Ant. N. Sakkoulas Publishers, Athens, 1997); Course, Theory and Language of International Law – “Objectivity” or International Common Interest? (Ant. N. Sakkoulas Publishers, Athens, 1997 – Nomiki Bibliothiki (new edit.), Athens, 2014); Barcelona Convention and Protocols – The Mediterranean Action Plan Regime (Simmonds & Hill Publishing Ltd., London, 1993); The Inadequacy of the Contractual Analogy in the Law of Treaties (Publications of the Hellenic Institute of International & Foreign Law, Athens, 1990).
