Andrea Farrés

Institution: University of Barcelona

Period of stay: 28 April - 28 July 2025

Contact: ajimenfa7@alumnes.ub.edu

Profile: 

Andrea Farrés is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona and her doctoral thesis focuses on the principle of humanity in international humanitarian law. She is currently working as a British Red Cross research fellow on the joint BRC/ICRC project on customary humanitarian law (IHL). Andrea holds a master’s in international law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), and an LL.M. from ESADE Law School (Barcelona).

Previously, Andrea worked as a research assistant at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she co-authored an article on nuclear weapons. Before that, she also worked for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the World Organisation Against Torture and the Spanish government on topics related to arms control, disarmament, human rights, the UN system and international law. She also worked as an independent consultant on issues dealing with human rights law and IHL.

She has written on the laws of targeting, new technologies, gender and human rights, and she has participated and presented her work in conferences like the San Remo roundtable organised by the ICRC and the IIHL, and the ESIL pre-conference workshop on Peace and Security.

Research Area:

International Humanitarian Law

Research Title:

The principle of humanity in international humanitarian law: Legal meaning, normative scope and its application in selected rules

Research Outline:

The principle of humanity is one of the foundations of IHL, and it counterbalances the principle of military necessity to ensure that total brutality does not occur. However, while the role of the principle of military necessity is widely studied by legal scholars and practitioners, the principle of humanity has remained at the margins of the legal literature. My project is driven by the idea that the understudy of this principle has overshadowed its potential for limiting violence in armed conflicts. In this regard, my project focuses on articulating what the principle of humanity can mean as a legal concept, and aims to unpack its legal value, which so far has been undetermined and underappreciated. The aim of this part of the project is to give a stronger conceptual and legal defence to the principle that permeates the body of humanitarian law and can be used for protection of human dignity.

The theoretical part of the project will be used for the analysis of two practical issues pertinent to the current armed conflicts: the conduct of hostilities and the protection of persons trapped in armed conflict. Regarding the conduct of hostilities, the research applies the principle of humanity to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield, aiming to answer the question of whether these decision-support systems help “humanise” armed conflicts or create the opposite effect. In relation to the protection of persons, the project focuses on the notion of collateral damage, which relates to the number of civilian deaths which are permitted in an armed attack, as long as they are proportionate to the military advantage gained. The study reevaluates the legal interpretations related to the idea of collateral damage by incorporating the principle of humanity in its application.

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