Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Staff Library, Room 7.4.1, Building 7, Fellows Lane
Contact
Event description
Australians generally, including Australian law schools, are currently paying increased attention to the Pacific. However Pacific literacy generally remains low, and this contributes to the marginalisation of the region and its peoples in scholarly and policy debates concerning law and justice (see eg Asafo and Tuiburelevu 2021 and Monson, Camacho and Foukona 2023). In this ‘talanoa’ or ‘tok stori’ (conversation), two path-breaking lawyers and eminent regional leaders, Dame Meg Taylor and Tuiloma Neroni Slade will share their insights regarding environmental, security and human rights challenges and opportunities facing the region in an era of climate change; the importance of Pacific-led justice and development; and the potential role that law students, law schools, lawyers and others can play in advancing justice across ‘our sea of islands’.
This session forms part of a series of events held in association with the Australian Association for Pacific Studies Conference, ‘To Hell with Drowning’, and is generously funded by the ANU College of Law together with the ANU School of Culture, History and Languages, the Asia Pacific Innovation Program, College of Asia and the Pacific, the ANU Gender Institute and the ANU Pacific Institute.
Speakers
Featured Speakers
Meg Taylor DBE's experience straddles both the public and private sector. This is at a national, regional and international level. She lead the World Bank Group private sector arm for 15 years. In this time she established and developed a dispute resolution and accountability mechanism.
An experienced legal practitioner in corporate and regulatory matters. She has also served on the Papua New Guinea Law Reform Commission. She represented PNG as Ambassador to the United States, Canada and Mexico for 5 years. She was also Secretary General to the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) from 2015 to 2021.
She currently serves as a Deputy Chair of the largest superannuation company in PNG, Nambawan Super Limited. Alongside this she is Director of the PNG Sustainable Development Program. A strong advocate for constitutional processes, good governance and democracy. This includes an active role pushing forward the role of civil society.
Tuiloma Neroni Slade was one of the first elected Judges of the International Criminal Court and to take office in 2003 in The Hague, The Netherlands. In earlier years, for interims periods, he had served as Acting Chief Justice of Samoa. Judge Slade has had an extensive career, internationally and in Samoa and the Pacific region: the first Samoan to be appointed as Attorney-General; senior counsel in the Legal Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London; Samoa’s Ambassador/Permanent Representative to the United Nations based in New York, and concurrently Ambassador to the USA and to Canada; a Presiding Judge of the International Criminal Court, The Hague; and as Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat based in Suva, Fiji. In his earlier career, from 1973-1976 he was leader of Samoa's delegation to the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. Over the years he has been involved in various Law of the Sea aspects and processes, including as Co-Chairman of the United Nations Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and Law of the Sea, New York, from 2000-2002.