When: Friday, December 4, 2020, 9:00 AM - 10:30 AMWhere: Online
The Pacific is home to some of the world’s most astonishing biological and cultural diversity. At the same time, Pacific Island nations are economically and technically under-resourced in the face of tremendous environmental challenges such as destructive weather events, ocean acidification, mining, logging, overfishing, and pollution. This unique collection navigates the major environmental law and governance challenges of the present and future of the Pacific. Covering 21 Pacific Island countries and territories, including Cook Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Samoa, and a broad range of themes, such as deep-sea mining, wetlands and mangroves, heritage, endangered species, human rights, and access to justice, Environmental Law and Governance in the Pacific provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview of environmental law and governance within specific jurisdictions as well as across the Pacific region as a whole.
Professor Malgosia Fitzmaurice is Professor of Public International Law at Queen Mary University of London and the Nippon Foundation Professor in Marine Environmental Law at IMLI, Malta. She specialises in international environmental law, whaling, indigenous rights and the law of treaties, and has published extensively on all these subjects Her monograph on “Whaling and International Law” was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2015. In 2001 she delivered The Hague Academy of International lecture on “The International Protection of the Environment”. She was admitted to the Institut de Droit International in 2019.
Dr Joseph Foukona is an Assistant Professor in legal history at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He was born and raised in Honiara, Solomon Islands. He received his LLB and LLM degrees from the University of the South Pacific in 2000 and 2001, and an LLM from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 2003. He completed a PhD on land, law and history at the Australian National University. Joseph was a lecturer for ten years at the University of the South Pacific. He has undertaken research on customary land tenure, climate change and natural disaster displacements and relocation, urban land, land reform, constitutional, and governance issues in the Pacific.
Dr Evan Hamman is a Senior Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology School of Law in Brisbane, Australia. He teaches in mining law as well as environmental and property law. His research focuses on biodiversity conservation and natural resource management in the Asia Pacific region. He has developing expertise in the domestic implementation of both the Ramsar and World Heritage regimes.
Professor Shaista Shameem is the Dean of the Justice Devendra Pathik School of Law. She attained her Doctorate in Juridical Science (SJD) from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and holds a PhD in Sociology from that same university. She taught Sociology, Social Anthropology and Women's Studies at the School of Social Sciences at Waikato University from 1985 until 1997 when she returned to Fiji to practise law. She was Director of the Fiji Human Rights Commission from 1999 until 2009 when she joined the School of Law, the University of Fiji as Associate Professor. She served in 2004-05 as UN Special Rapporteur on the Use of Mercenaries and has since 2005 been a member of the UN Working Group on Mercenaries.
Dr Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Environmental Law at the Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development at the University of the South Pacific. She is also an Attorney at Blue Ocean Law, a boutique international law firm based in Guam specialising in human and indigenous rights, self-determination and environmental justice in the Pacific. Prior to joining Leiden University, Margaretha was a (Senior) Lecturer in Environmental Law at the University of the South Pacific School of Law in Port Vila, Vanuatu where she coordinated the environmental law programme.
**Please note this is an online event and all registrants will be sent joining instructions the day before the event.