Kirsten Baxter

Legal Counsel, Head of Legal Service (LS)

Kirsten Baxter was born and raised in the north of Scotland. She studied Scots law and public international law at the University of Glasgow before being awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to pursue an LL.M. at the University of Toronto, Canada, graduating in 1997. Her research work focused upon the use of international and foreign domestic law and normativity in constitutional jurisprudence relating to capital punishment.

Kirsten’s legal career includes work at the North Carolina Resource Center (now the Center for Death Penalty Litigation) in Durham, North Carolina, and in the chambers of Justice Kriegler at the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She taught in the Department of Criminal Justice at Radford University, Virginia, before joining the United Nations in New York, where she spent ten years serving in the registries of the United Nations Administrative Tribunal and its successor, the United Nations Appeals Tribunal.

Kirsten joined CERN in 2009, returning in 2014 after a brief period away. She has held a succession of increasingly senior positions within the Legal Service and has served as Legal Counsel of the Organization since 2021.

A frequent speaker and published author on public international law and the law of the international civil service, Kirsten is co-Chair of FILIO (the Forum for Institutional Law in International Organisations) and was recently appointed President and Judge of the Administrative Court of the European Public Law Organization.