Anne Aagten

Anne Aagten has been an Academy Programme Fellow at the Clingendael Institute since May 2024. In this role, she develops, coordinates, and provides training programmes for diplomats and other professionals in international relations with a focus on international law, human rights, cyber governance, and diplomacy. 

Prior to joining the Clingendael Institute, she worked for five years as legal officer in public international law at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. In that capacity, she provided legal advice on a variety of matters such as the application of international law in cyberspace, was part of delegations for the UN open-ended working group cybersecurity, the UN ad-hoc committee cybercrime and she was the Dutch representative for the UN Sixth Committee and the Council of Europe working group for the more effective handling of inter-State cases. Besides that, she worked on legal procedures such as the inter-State case regarding the downing of Flight MH17 before the European Court of Human Rights. During this same period, Anne was also seconded for eight months to the Ministry of Justice and Security as Legal Advisor Human Rights where she was responsible for writing the submissions on behalf of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in various cases pending before the European Court of Human Rights and UN Human Rights Committees. 

Before working for the Dutch Government, Anne has been a research and teaching staff member at Leiden University where she taught European Asylum Law, Dutch Immigration Law and Migration Law and Policy in the EU and supervised bachelor- and master theses. Her research activities focused on the application of Article 1F of the Refugee Convention on the basis of which the state parties can exclude individuals from obtaining asylum status if there is a suspicion the person in question has committed grave crimes. Anne holds an LLM degree in Public International Law from Leiden University and a bachelor’s degree International and European law from the University of Groningen, both programmes meet the requirements for “civiel effect”.