Peter C. Hansen

Peter C. Hansen is a public international law specialist and trial and appellate attorney who advises both private and public-sector clients on a wide range of international and domestic matters.

Mr. Hansen’s clients have included corporations in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States, various international organizations, arbitration centers in the Middle East, and a host of individuals.

Mr. Hansen’s practice is extremely wide-ranging. He advised ECOWAS on the legal restructuring of the Dakar-Bamako rail line. At the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Hansen’s legal team secured the largest-ever individual award in the history of international civil service law – valued at over $1.58 million. At the World Bank Administrative Tribunal, Mr. Hansen’s legal team was the first in 35 years to prove racial discrimination against a staff member. He successfully defended a man wrongfully accused of sexual assault before a District of Columbia civil jury. He has advised numerous clients in African investment matters, has represented many staff of international organizations in their employment disputes and misconduct investigations, and has assisted clients worldwide in World Bank debarment and sanctions matters.

From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Hansen served as Editor in Chief of the benchmark publication, International Legal Materials, at the American Society of International Law. Mr. Hansen worked in various capacities for the World Bank from 2000 to 2010, serving as counsel and consultant at the World Bank Administrative Tribunal (WBAT), as Managing Editor of the scholarly journal of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), and as a legal consultant with the then-named Office of Evaluation and Suspension (OES), which later became the Sanctions and Debarment Office (SDO).

During 2005 and 2006, Mr. Hansen served as a Legal Officer in the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, Codification Division, where he helped lead the development of an International Law Commission (ILC) study on the deportation and expulsion of aliens and produced studies for the U.N. Repertory of Practice. He led a team that compiled an analytical summary of 94 deportation and expulsion laws from 49 countries, with Mr. Hansen personally working with English, French, Spanish, and Italian texts.

For many years, Mr. Hansen served as Adjunct Professor of International Law at the American University School of International Service. He has trained hundreds of African officials in the planning and management of public-private partnerships (PPPs) through numerous lecture courses which he designed for IP3 (Tetratech). He has provided briefings for the U.S. Congress, the U.S. State Department, Ex-Im Bank (U.S.), and the World Bank’s Law, Justice and Development Forum.

Mr. Hansen is the author of seminal articles on World Bank employment law, as well as of scholarly and occasional pieces on African investment issues. He was formerly a regular contributor to International Law Reports focusing on U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Mr. Hansen is a former Chair of the D.C. Bar's International Investment & Finance Committee and a former President and current Chair of the Board of Directors of the Cambridge Society of Washington, D.C.

Mr. Hansen is a U.S. national who is fluent in French and reads legal Spanish.

Bar Admissions

• District of Columbia (1998)
• New York (1997)

Education

• Cambridge University, LLM (2004)
• American University Washington College of Law, JD (1996)
• American University School of International Service – Washington, D.C.
  MA, International Economic Policy (1997)
  BA, magna cum laude, International Affairs (1993)