Professor Stephen B Cohen - Professor of Law, Georgetown University, USA
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Since 1980, Stephen Cohen has taught courses at the Law Center in his two principal areas of expertise: tax and international human rights. He served as Corporate Secretary of the Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund, established by the US Government to encourage private sector development in Southern Africa. He was also Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights from 1978–80 and has been a consultant to the Department of State.
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His writings include a casebook on federal income taxation and various articles on tax and corporate law and on national security and foreign policy. Professor Cohen has also taught at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Cape Town, and Heidelberg University, Germany.
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Mr Sternford Moyo - Senior Partner, Scanlen and Holderness; IBAHRI Co-Chair, Zimbabwe
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Sternford Moyo is currently Co-Chair of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI), Council Member of the International Bar Association’s (IBA) Public and Professional Interest Division (PPID) and sits on the IBA Council. He is former President of both the Law Society of Zimbabwe and the Southern African Development Community Lawyers’ Association. |
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Mr Moyo is the Senior Partner and Chairman of the law firm Scanlen & Holderness, which he joined in 1981. He provides overall leadership to the firm, in addition to taking special responsibility for the commercial and corporate law department. While Mr Moyo’s primary areas of practice are mining, commercial and corporate law, he has assisted in complex litigation of constitutional matters as well as the intimidation and harassment of lawyers. He has also advised financial institutions and loan underwriters in most of the large infrastructure projects to have taken place in post independent Zimbabwe, in areas such as forestry, energy, water supply and telecommunications.
During the early part of his career, Sternford taught corporate, commercial and constitutional law. He successfully completed the Media Law Advocates Training Programme run by the University of Oxford. He graduated with a distinction and was named by Butterworths as one of the most outstanding postgraduate law students in 1981.
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Professor Robin Palmer - Director of the Institute for Professional Legal Training, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
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Robin Palmer is Director of the Institute for Professional Legal Training (IPLT), which is affiliated to the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, South Africa and is a practising advocate (barrister). From 1992 he was Director of the Law Clinic and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Natal (later UKZN).
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Mr Palmer practised as an advocate at the KwaZulu-Natal Bar, where he has been involved in numerous high-profile cases, including serving as defence counsel in the Trust Feed trial, in which the existence of apartheid hit squads was conclusively proven. Since 2006 he has been Lead Specialist Prosecutor of the Life case, where international brokers, local hospital groups and surgeons are being prosecuted for illegal organ trafficking.
Mr Palmer has also completed various training courses and consultancies for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Open Society Foundations (OSF), Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA), the Commonwealth, US Agency for international Development (USAID), German International Cooperation (GIZ), Department for International Development (DFID), the South Africa Legal Aid Board, and others, from 1995 to the present, including anti-corruption initiatives, justice reform, legal aid, anti-terrorism constitutional development and good governance projects in various African and East-European countries, and was lead consultant in the recently completed UNODC expert group meeting on private/public security cooperation in Vienna. He initiated, and has been running a postgraduate diploma course in forensic investigation at UKZN since 2000, and is currently specialising in transnational and international criminal law, corruption issues and legal sector reform. He has authored and co-authored six textbooks, in law, writing, reasoning and research skills, and published newspaper and journal articles in diverse fields.
Mr Palmer’s current specialisation is combating grand corruption in Africa, and he has initiated, in cooperation with OSISA, an anti-corruption task team to research, develop and implement selected anti-corruption programmes and strategies, including targeted litigation.
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Mr Thomas Pogge - Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, USA (Taskforce Chair)
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Having received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard, Thomas Pogge has published widely on Kant and in moral and political philosophy. He is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale, Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University, Research Director at the Oslo University Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN) and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science. |
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His recent publications include Politics as Usual, Polity 2010; Kant, Rawls, and Global Justice (Chinese), Shanghai Translation Press 2010; Hacer justicia a la humanidad, FCE 2009; World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd edn, Polity 2008; Global Justice and Global Ethics, co-edited, Paragon House 2008; The Health Impact Fund, co-authored with Aidan Hollis, 2008; John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, Oxford 2007; and Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right, edited, Oxford & UNESCO 2007.
Supported by the Australian Research Council, the BUPA Foundation and the European Commission, Mr Pogge’s current work is focused on a team effort toward developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide (www.healthimpactfund.org).
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Mr Pascal Saint-Amans - Director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, OECD
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Pascal Saint-Amans has been appointed Director of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration (CTP). He will take up his duties on 1 February 2012 upon the retirement of Mr Jeffrey Owens.Mr Saint-Amans, a French national, joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in September 2007 as Head of the International Cooperation and Tax Competition Division in the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration Department (CTPA).
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He was responsible for the OECD’s work on harmful tax practices, money laundering and tax crimes, the tax aspects of countering bribery of foreign officials and administrative cooperation between tax authorities. He played a key role in the advancement of the OECD tax transparency agenda in the context of the G20. In October 2009 he was appointed Head of the Global Forum Division, created to service the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, a programme with the participation of over 100 countries.
Prior to joining the OECD, Mr Saint-Amans worked at the ‘Direction Générale des Impôts’ (DGI) of the Ministry of Finance in Paris, where he was in charge of following the EU work on direct taxes, the legislation on wealth tax, mergers and spin offs; as well as, tax treaty negotiations and mutual agreement procedures. He was also a French delegate to the WP1 of the Committee on Fiscal Affairs, before being elected Chair of that group in 2005. He was a member of the UN Group of experts on international tax co-operation, and a ‘rapporteur’ in 2006. His last position in the DGI was Deputy Director in charge of litigation. Mr Saint-Amans also served as Financial Director of the Energy Regulation Committee between 1999 and 2002 and was responsible for the introduction of new electricity tariffs in France.
Mr Saint-Amans holds a BA in History and a degree from the Institut d’études politiques of Paris. In 1996, he graduated from the National School of Administration (ENA), France.
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Professor Celia Wells - Head of Bristol University Law School, UK
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Celia Wells joined the University of Bristol as Professor of Criminal Law in January 2009. She was appointed Head of the Law School in 2010. She was awarded the OBE for services to legal education in 2006 and was President of the Society of Legal Scholars of Great Britain and Ireland in 2006–2007. |
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Professor Wells’ research is mainly in criminal law with a particular specialism in corporate criminal liability. She is the author of Corporations and Criminal Responsibility (2nd edn OUP 2001) and of Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Nicola Lacey and Oliver Quick, 4th edn Cambridge University Press). She has provided expert advice on corporate criminal responsibility to a number of national and international bodies including: OECD Bribery Convention Working Group; Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry into the Draft Corporate Manslaughter Bill (2005); the International Commission of Jurists’ Expert Legal Panel on Corporate Complicity in International Crimes (2006); and as expert witness to the Parliamentary Joint Scrutiny Committee on the draft Bribery Bill 2009, resulting in a sharpening of the corporate offence (now the Bribery Act 2010, section 7).
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Task Force rapporteur - Lloyd Lipset, President, LKL International Consulting Inc, Canada
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Lloyd Lipsett is an international lawyer with 15 years of specialisation in human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and corporate social responsibility.
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He has developed a unique niche in the field of human rights impact and compliance assessment related to business and trade: he is working with the United Nations to undertake a human rights impact assessment of Vanuatu's accession to the World Trade Organization that includes an analysis of issues related to Vanuatu’s status as a tax haven;he has worked with Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada to develop the methodology for the annual human rights reporting process to Parliament with respect to the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement; he was the Senior Reviewer and Human Rights Expert for the human rights assessment of Goldcorp's Marlin Mine in Guatemala; he has undertaken a human rights compliance assessment of the North American operations of BHP Billiton’s Diamond & Special Product Group; and he worked on the five case studies that tested Rights & Democracy’s community-based human rights impact assessment methodology in Argentina, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru and the Philippines.
Mr Lipsett’s international human rights expertise has been shaped by his work with public and private companies, multilateral agencies, government departments and agencies, non-governmental organisations and First Nations councils. From 2003 to 2008, he acted as Senior Assistant to the President of Rights & Democracy and participated in all aspects of the organisation’s international and Canadian mandates. This included annual reporting to Parliament, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency, as well as negotiating partnerships with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Commonwealth Human Rights Unit and the Danish Institute for Human Rights on shared programming priorities. He also worked closely with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, as well as the various provincial human rights commissions, on issues related to Canada’s commitment to international human rights.
Lloyd began his law career as a corporate litigator at McMillan Binch in Toronto. His formal education is from Queen’s University in philosophy and politics; and then from McGill University in law. He is a member in good standing of the Law Society of Upper Canada.
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Task Force facilitator - Shirley Pouget, Programme Lawyer, IBAHRI, France
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Shirley is a Programme Lawyer at the IBAHRI and acts as the Task Force facilitator. Since September 2010, she has conducted extensive preliminary researches on issues related to poverty, human rights and financial flows, out of which she developed the idea of convening a task force to assess linkages between these inter-connected concepts.
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Shirley developed the project in the last semester of 2010–2011 and sought funding in early 2012. She is responsible for the overall management of the Task Force. At the IBAHRI she also manages a wide range of projects which relate to human rights in the administration of justice, including inter alia, undertaking fact-finding missions and sending trial observers to countries where the rule of law has deteriorated (Syria and Thailand), pioneering advocacy programmes to support the establishment of international justice mechanisms where individuals face serious human rights violations and rule of law projects where the independence of the judiciary (Burma-Myanmar).
Before joining the IBAHRI, Shirley worked as a cabinet member of André Vallini, President of the Isère council, France (Conseil Général de l'Isère) and Senator, where she mainly advised on French Justice Reform and criminal draft legislation.
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