The Executive Committee manages the day-to-day affairs of the Association and prepares the meeting of the General Assembly. It is composed of the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary-General and the Treasurer.
The General Assembly is SELA’s supreme authority. It is composed of all the members. The General Assembly holds annual ordinary meetings.
President
Professor emeritus of European and International Economic Law at the University of Bern; former managing director of the World Trade Institute. He has extensive experience as a trade negotiator for Switzerland and as chair and member of numerous GATT and WTO dispute settlement panels His interest in energy law mainly relates to the challenges climate change mitigation and energy security from a perspective of multilevel governance entailing international, European and Swiss law.
Secretary
Ilaria Espa is Senior Assistant Professor of International Economic Law at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Senior Research Fellow at the World Trade Institute and Adjunct Professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. She is furthermore Lead Counsel of the ‘Natural Resources’ Programme of the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL).
She has extensive expertise on issues at the intersection of trade and sustainability, mainly in the areas of climate change, energy and commodities, as well as on the law governing the sustainable management of natural resources. Her interest in energy law lies in the challenges to and the opportunities entailed by the energy transition with a focus on the potential of carbon market mechanisms and new technologies/applications such as carbon capture and storage to accelerate change in Switzerland and beyond.
Treausurer
Tetyana Payosova is a senior associate at Van Bael & Bellis where she advises sovereign and corporate clients on various aspects of international trade law, including WTO and FTA litigation, ongoing WTO and FTA negotiations, sanctions and foreign direct investment screening. Tetyana also advises on trade aspects of EU environmental and energy legislation, including in the field of carbon border adjustment and renewable energy.
Prior to joining Van Bael & Bellis, she was a legal advisor at the International Rail Transport Committee (CIT) and a research fellow at the Institute for International Economic Law of the University of Bern. Tetyana has held various teaching and research posts in Brazil, Switzerland, Ukraine and the US. Her research interest in energy law focuses on international trade and investment aspects of (renewable) energy regulation and green transition, as well as on Swiss-EU bilateral relations in the energy sector.
Federico Piccaluga is General Counsel of Duferco Group and a qualified lawyer with international in-house experience in energy law. He is also in charge of Duferco Group Sustainability activities. In 2019, he has been appointed Non-Executive Board Member of Wesii, an Italian start-up operating worldwide, that provides cutting-edge multispectral inspection services in the energy sector.
He is Adjunct Professor of Energy Law and Environmental Sustainability at Politecnico di Milano . Federico is a member of the Swiss Bar Association and also actively participates in different organizations including the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), in which he holds the role of Country Representative for Switzerland.
Kateryna Holzer is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Climate, Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Eastern Finland, where she also teaches a course on International Economic Law and Green Transitions. Formerly she was visiting scholar at the WTO Trade and Environment Division and worked as a postdoc at the World Trade Institute in Bern and as an assistant professor at the Academy of Foreign Trade in Kyiv. Her research interests in energy law revolve around the role of trade instruments in fostering the transition to a zero-carbon future, including energy taxes, product sustainability standards and border carbon adjustments.