At four years old, Alexia Solomou was asked the classic question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Her answer, she admits, shocked her aunt: “A lawyer… so that I can judge my parents.”
Her parents were going through a divorce at the time. She had no idea yet that lawyers and judges were different things. But the instinct for a sense of injustice in her immediate world and the belief that someone ought to do something about it was growing. Three decades later, she has spent her career doing exactly that, from the highest court in the world to the most personal conversations imaginable.
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Alexia Solomou is a Partner at Spencer West Cyprus, specialising in technology, data protection, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. She brings fifteen years of experience across international organisations, law firms, and universities, including the International Court of Justice, the European Union Agency for Asylum, and the University of Cambridge.
The Language Of Power
Solomou grew up in Limassol, left at eighteen, and spent the next thirteen years abroad, studying law at UCL and Paris II, completing a master’s at Columbia Law School in New York, and then, at twenty-two, arriving at the International Court of Justice in The Hague as Columbia’s selected judicial fellow. Her first job was clerking for the President of the court.
What she encountered there was a masterclass in how power constructs language. Fifteen judges, including diplomats, practitioners, and academics, are working on the same text, each pulling it in a different direction. “It’s as if many cooks are cooking the same dish,” she says. But the result was more than perhaps oversalted broth. Judgments could be perfectly crafted and still fall, as she puts it, into “a big black void.” There is no international police.
After five years connected to the ICJ, she returned to Cyprus and joined what became the European Union Agency for Asylum, working there from 2020 to early 2024. She completed around 150 cases, primarily from sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. The legal framework, she says, was not the challenge. The challenge was sitting across from human beings who had survived things most people would struggle to even imagine: houses burned, families killed, women who had been trafficked, and remaining steady enough, at least during office hours, to do her job. After three years, she felt she had done her part and closed that chapter.
Between those two chapters, something else was taking shape in her life. In 2017, at exactly thirty, she faced a serious health crisis. “I saw death in the face,” she says. Her priorities reshuffled. Her career, which had always come first, suddenly dropped down the list, and health, both physical and mental, moved to the top, sharing the podium with family. In 2022, she published a poetry book she had long been afraid to release, afraid, as a lawyer, of what people would think. But her experience taught her that her life was too short not to pursue her dreams. “When you look at death in the eyes,” she says, “you don’t care anymore.”
She joined Spencer West Cyprus in 2024 and describes moving from international organisations to private practice as the biggest mental shift of her career.
Asked what advice she would give a young woman with a dream,
“Don’t postpone something you can do today to tomorrow. The human beings that you love are not going to be there forever.”
Alexia Solomou is the third guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her reflections on the ICJ, asylum work, power, and the values she has built her life around since, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that shaped them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
The first season, Women Building Cyprus, follows women whose lives and decisions are changing what this island can be.
A production of OLOI Media and The Future Media.
