LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: Dame Sally will explore global governance for health using the two pandemics of COVID 19 and Antimicrobial Resistance as exemplars highlighting the importance of data and innovation.Dame Sally Davies is the 40th Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University, the UK Government’s Special Envoy on AMR and the chair of The Trinity Challenge, which she set up in May 2020. Before this, from March 2011 to September 2019, she was Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government. Dame Sally was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Board 2014-2016 and led delegations to a range of WHO summits and forums since 2004. Dame Sally advocates globally on AMR: for three years, Dame Sally was the chair of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on AMR and later co-convener of the UN Inter-Agency Co-ordination Group on AMR, set up in response to the AMR declaration made at UNGA 2016. Dame Sally is a member of the UN Global Leaders Group on AMR, since 2020, serving alongside Heads of State, Ministers and prominent figures from around the world. Dame Sally is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US Academy of Science. In the 2020 New Year’s Honours, Dame Sally was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) for services to public health and research, having received her DBE in 2009.

Ian Gaunt – Arbitrator, LMAA Past President Clive Aston – Arbitrator, LMAA Past President

Speakers:Can Yeginsu – Barrister, 4 New SquareDr Hayk Kupelyants – Associate, Dechert

Cambridge Arbitration Society, CUArb, was established in 2019 as a registered society at the University of Cambridge. The establishment of the society was a response to Cambridge students’ demands to have exposure to the current arbitration scene.The CUArb aims at promoting the study of international commercial and investment arbitration amongst students, academics, alumni and law practitioners. It seeks to serve as both an educational and networking platform to facilitate discussions on emerging topics in international arbitration and connect students with practitioners.The CUArb runs a few projects including annual conferences, annual lectures series, preparatory seminars for the Vis Moot competition, educational workshops on arbitration and an arbitration lap. Membership of the CUArb is open to all members at the University of Cambridge and individuals interested in the study and practice of international commercial and investment arbitration.Speakers:Samaa Haridi – Partner, Hogan Lovells Prof Anne Marie Whitesell – Professor, Georgetown University

This lecture will be based on my recently edited book, The Performance of Africa's International Courts: Using Litigation for Political, Legal, and Social Change, (OUP, 2020). The central claim made in the book is that Africa’s international courts have important impacts that have so far been underemphasized or are entirely ignored in the scholarship on international courts. This book departs from approaches that measure the performance of Africa's international courts based on compliance with or effectiveness of their judgments. The book does so by putting the users of Africa’s international courts and their broader strategies at the center of the analysis. It adopts an-depth case study approach that focuses on how the litigation process in these courts is used by litigants to advance and promote their commitment to their ideals. It delves into the messy world of legal, social and political mobilization. It examines the choices made by activists, litigants, and opposition parties who bring cases before these international courts against those in control of dominant and authoritarian party regimes. In doing so, the book complements the attention to legal and doctrinal questions as well as the challenges of compliance with decisions of these courts that the first generation of scholarship on Africa’s international courts emphasized.James T. Gathii is the Wing-Tat Lee Chair in International Law and Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since July 2012.

Speakers: Dr Giorgio Risso – Associate, Cleary Gottlieb Agnieszka Zarówna – Associate, White & Case

A series of conversations on international legal scholarship, political engagement and the transformative potential of academia. Each conversation is chaired by Francisco José Quintana and Marina Veličković and centres around a theme, concept or a method and their relationship to political movements, struggles and margins from which they have emerged and within (and for) which they have emancipatory potential.

Offshore exploitation of oil and gas started in the 1930s and thousands of installations are distributed around the world. Offshore installations threaten the environment, not only when it comes to oil spills, which are most visible but admittedly rare, but also in relation to their contribution to marine debris, pollution by dumping and greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, the construction, operation and decommissioning of offshore installations, in the energy sector and beyond, is one of the maritime economic activities that has not yet been comprehensively regulated at the global level. The relevant international legal framework consists of a plethora of instruments adopted at the global, regional and supranational level, which have developed in different institutional settings and following different formats. The result is that, first, there is no specialised framework convention and consequently, the legal framework is fragmented at the sectoral, institutional, geographical and issue-related level. Second, the legal framework is weak because of the non-binding nature of many of the instruments that are the outcome of unconventional lawmaking1 processes. Third, the lawmaking processes in this field seem to be industry-led because of the important role the industry plays in unconventional lawmaking, both within and outside conventional fora.

This lecture is is part of the Art, Architecture and International Law seminar series which is being launched this academic year. The series is designed to bridge the worlds of art, architecture and international law. It explores the different ways in which art and architecture and international law intersect. It also demonstrates that international law exists well beyond the written word.Lecture summary: At the heart of this lecture is the question of how music could serve as an effective instrumental tool for rethinking the theoretical and processual dimensions of international law in Africa. This lecture argues that socially conscious songs provide a beneficial lens/gateway to the popular understanding of the problematics of international law. As Daniel Newman rightly noted, “the use of popular music offers a writer a valuable device to render what could be quite dry and, otherwise dull, argument suddenly more interesting and thus engaging to the reader”. Such knowledge further engenders the possibility of repurposing the applicative dimensions of international law on the continent.Babatunde Fagbayibo is a Professor in Law at the University of South Africa. He graduated with a doctoral degree in Public Law, with specialisation in regional integration law, from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research interests include supranational regionalism, transnational policy analysis, critical approaches to international law, and governance and democratisation in Africa. His writings have been published in several academic journals, as chapters in books, and on other online platforms. In 2014, he was recognised by the Young People in International Affairs (YPIA) as one of the top 35 Africans under the age of 35 for his research in the field of supranational regionalism in Africa. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Southern African Public Law Journal (SAPL) and is on the editorial boards of the African Journal of Democracy and Governance (RADG) and the Nigerian Yearbook of International Law (NYIL).

The distinctive vocabulary and broad principles of the modern laws of war developed within a broader project that from early modernity spelled out the nature and powers of state sovereignty. This lecture focuses on the Enlightenment theorists of “regular war.” It shows how their project of limiting war through law was anchored in a capacious conception of sovereign power, in which reason of state appeared as a restraining force through the vehicle of the law of nations.This Enlightenment project of regular war is contrasted with late-19th century humanitarianism, which had serious misgivings about reason of state and sovereignty itself. Restraint through humanitarian action was possible only with state support, but it resulted from neutral rescue action and moral condemnation.The lecture shows how these two conflicting conceptions of restraint came together in the first codified instruments of the laws of war, and how they are still present in the law of armed conflict. It concludes by discussing some implications of this genealogical analysis for contemporary debates on the convergence of international humanitarian, human rights, and criminal law.Pablo Kalmanovitz is research professor and head of the International Studies Division at CIDE, in Mexico City, and general editor of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law. He has held permanent or visiting positions at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, the European University Institute, Yale University, McGill University, and the University of Ulster. His research focuses on historical and theoretical aspects of the international regulation of armed force, on which he has published numerous articles and book chapters. His book The Laws of War in International Thought was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.