"The ship has reached the shore" A New agreement on marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction
Co-hosted with the Institute of International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), Melbourne Law School, the panel discussed the implication of the new international agreement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.
The seminar was held at Melbourne Law School on Monday 20 March 2023.
Background:
On March 4, 2023, after a marathon 38 hours straight of negotiation, following two weeks of discussions and two decades of hard work, countries finalised the text of a new international agreement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction. The text covers nearly two-thirds of the ocean, reflects twenty years of work and has been claimed as a victory for multilateralism. Negotiations were towards a package to cover access and benefit sharing regarding marine genetic resources, capacity building and transfer of marine technology, environmental impact assessments and area based management tools including marine protected areas. Professor Lydia Slobodian, visiting from Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, joined by Professor Abbe Brown, Dr. Janine Felson and Professor Margaret Young discussed the implications of this agreement and the long hard fight to get us here.
Speakers:
Professor Abbe Brown is Chair in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and in 2023, she is a Visitor at the University of Melbourne, hosted by the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Abbe is a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative. She was honoured to form part of their contribution to the successful agreement of the new international agreement on marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, and she was involved in particular on marine genetic resources, access and benefit sharing and technology transfer.
Dr Janine Felson is an Ambassador of Belize and a senior advisor to the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) on climate and ocean matters. For more than two decades, she has been a leading voice for small island developing states (SIDS) in key negotiations including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement, the Paris Agreement Rulebook, and recently the intergovernmental conference for a new high seas treaty on marine biological diversity, with the aim of tailoring global policy to the specific needs and circumstances of SIDS. Ambassador Felson is concurrently completing a fellowship with Melbourne Climate Futures at the University of Melbourne where she is focused on integrated approaches to global policy on climate, oceans, and sustainable development.
Professor Lydia Slobodian is the Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at Georgetown Law in Washington, DC, where she teaches international environmental law. Her research focuses on biodiversity and climate change and covers legal issues ranging from extraterritorial jurisdiction to intergenerational equity. Prior to Georgetown, she worked as Senior Legal Officer for IUCN, where she led the IUCN delegation to the negotiations on marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction, which she continues to participate in. She is a founding partner of L4Earth, an international nonprofit organization which strives to identify and promote legal levers for transformational planetary change. She is currently working on projects on mangrove governance, ecosystem restoration and environmental rule of law with partners including IUCN, WWF and UNEP.
Professor Margaret Young of Melbourne Law School teaches and researches in public international law, the law of the sea, international trade law, climate change and environmental law. Elected in 2021 as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, Margaret is also academic consultant to the World Bank’s Blue Economy Program. She is currently completing an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project on International Adjudication (with Judge Hilary Charlesworth). She was awarded the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Academy of Environmental Law Junior Scholar Prize and the University of Melbourne Woodward Medal in Humanities and Social Sciences for her work Trading Fish, Saving Fish: The Interaction between Regimes in International Law (CUP, 2011). From mid-2023, she will commence an ARC Future Fellowship on ‘The Blue Economy and International Law’.
