SOAS School of Law

SOAS School of Law Research Newsletter Issue 12, Oct 2016–April 2017 Research News from Staff and Students Contents Firstly, in research grant news, Dr Melek Saral of the Universi- Research News 1-2 ty of Zurich and Professor Mashood Baderin of the SOAS School of Law have been awarded a 2-year Marie Curie Fellowship grant of €183,454 for a research project on ‘Human Rights in Post-Uprisings Arbitration in Africa Project 3 Middle East: Emerging Discourses and Practices in Egypt and Tuni- sia’. The project commenced on 1 May 2017 and will run for 24 EconoSocioLegal Inspiration 4 months. Dr Saral will be working under the supervision of Professor Baderin as a full-time fellow and staff member in the SOAS School of Law. The research project aims at interrogating the human rights The In/Formal Constitution in 5-6 discourses and practices in the MENA region undergoing transition Central Asia through the course of the so-called Arab Spring by conducting a On Military Law, Melbourne 7 comparative analysis of two key countries — Egypt and Tunisia. Pro- and General Melchett fessor Carol Tan was also awarded £700 from the Sino-British Fel- lowship Trust to continue fieldwork in Hong Kong on migrant work- Research Centre Activities 8-9 ers’ experiences of the Labour Tribunal. We also have some PhD completions to celebrate. Prince Constitutional Systems Book 9 N.C. Olokotor successfully defended his thesis with minor correc- Launch tions. Dr Olokotor's thesis examined the attitudes of the English and Nigerian courts towards the enforcement of transnational arbitral New Publications 10-12 awards under the New York Convention for the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. He was supervised by Dr Conference Presentations 13-15 Emilia Onyema. Jinan Yousef Bastaki also passed her PhD with mi- nor corrections on the topic of ‘Refugees No More: The Implications of Citizenship for the Palestinian Right of Return’. Dr Bastaki was Professor Lynn Welchman (2nd from left) and Professor Ziba Mir-Hosseini (7th from left) with Palestinian Shari’a Court judges and other international experts at a roundtable discussion convened by UN Women and Musawah, Amman, 9 February 2017 (see page 2). Photo: http://palestine.unwomen.org/en/news-and-events/stories/2017/02/sharia-judges-meeting. 1 supervised by Dr Catriona Drew and Professor Lynn Welchman. Two of Professor Werner Menski’s students have also recently completed their PhDs. Manpreet Kaur Virdi’s thesis was on the topic of ‘Marriage Breakdown Amongst Punjabi-Sikhs in Canada: A Legal Ethnography of Disputes, Navigating (Un)official Forums and Access to Family Justice in Ontario, Canada’ and Biswajit Chanda’s thesis was on ‘Family Law Reform in Bangladesh: The Need for a Culture-Specific Legal System’. Members of SOAS School of Law have recently been featured in the media. Dr Gunnar Beck appeared on BBC television (Daily Politics, 27 Jan 2017) and BBC Radio Scotland (Good Morning Scotland, 26 Feb 2017) to discuss various legal aspects of the Brexit process, and wrote an article on Germany’s euro bail-out under the European Central Bank’s Target2 system for Rheinische Post, Düsseldorf (May 2017). In addition he gave an interview to Mainichi Shimbun Newspaper, Tokyo, on the legal and economic aspects of Brexit and the euro crisis (April 2017). Dr Samia Bano was a panel member on BBC Radio 4 Beyond Belief Pro- gramme on Sharia Councils on 20 September 2016. Professor Mashood Baderin was featured in the supplementary weekly pull-out ‘Lawyer’ in the Nigerian This Day Newspaper on 2 May 2017 as part of the SOAS Centenary event in Lagos, Nigeria. In the centre-page double spread interview, he answered questions on different issues including Nigeria’s anticorruption war, allegations of abuses in IDP Camps in North-Eastern Nigeria and the implications of the Nigerian government’s disobedience to court orders. Dr Aeyal Gross discussed his new book The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation in a podcast for the Tel Aviv Review on TLV1. In other news, Professor Fareda Banda was invited by CEDAW and the OHCHR to participate in an expert group meeting on updating General Recommendation 19 of CEDAW on 9 February 2017. Essays written by the boys of Sutton Grammar as part of the SOAS leg of a joint British Council grant with Brandeis University in 2014, have appeared in an ebook produced by the British Council titled Bridging Voices 2013- 2016: Projects and Partners. In February 2017, Professor Lynn Welchman participated, together with Professor Ziba Mir-Hosseini (Professorial Research Associ- ate at CIMEL), in a roundtable meeting organised in Amman by UN Women and Musawah (the Global Network for Justice and Equality in the Muslim Family) with members of the Pal- estinian Shari`a Court Judiciary from the West Bank. The roundtable discussion was held under the working title New Directions in Islamic Legal Thought: Gender-Responsive Knowledge and Adjudication (see photo on page 1). Meanwhile, Dr Makeen Makeen has been appointed a member of the Standing Committee for Legal Affairs of the International Council of Museums [ICOM] to advise on the copyright issues facing museums. Dr Makeen’s mandate runs from 1 January 2017–31 December 2019. Dr Nimer Sultany was the Arab-American Educational Foundation Visiting Associate Professor in Arab Studies at the University of Houston during March–April 2017. Dr Sultany also visited Tunisia during February- March 2017 for field research related to his book project for Oxford University Press on the role of law in the Arab Spring. Finally, some noteworthy conferences have also taken place during the period covered by this newsletter. Professor Lynn Welchman, Ruba Salih and Elena Zambelli (CGS) co-convened with LMEI a conference at SOAS on 9 –10 December under the title ‘Gender and Generation in the Aftermath of the Uprisings: Political Visions, Desires, Movements in the Middle East and North Africa Today’. The conference was conceived as an additional activity towards the end of the POWER2YOUTH project involving partners from academic institutions in Europe and the South East Mediterranean. Colleagues from Gender Studies, Media Studies and Politics chaired sessions and a num- ber of School of Law postgraduates attended along with many others. The SOAS School of Law also financially supported the Public Interest Environmental Law (PIEL) Conference, an annual, student-led event that seeks to bring together students and professionals for a day of talks and panel discussions on a contemporary environmental law issues. It took place on 7 April 2017 and its focus was ‘Brexit and the Green Economy: What Now?’ Its organising committee included three SOAS LLM students who took lead posi- tions in organising this event: The secretary position was held by Rebecca Wembri, a current LLM (International Law) student. Alison Wade, a current LLM (Environmental Law) held the Speaker Coordinator position and the Chair was held by Tabea Wilkes, an LLM (International Law) student. 2 SOAS Arbitration in Africa Research Project Dr Emilia Onyema My research generally covers international arbitration with regional interests in Africa. Particularly I interrogate the growth (or lack) of international arbitration across the African continent. In the course of my research and writings, I realised there was an absence of what I have termed ‘African voices’ in international arbitration discourses and decided to further interrogate this. By ‘African voices’, I refer to the views of African judiciaries, arbitration academics and practitioners in shaping international arbitral jurisprudence. I designed a four-year research project (2015-2018) aimed at transforming and enhancing the use of arbitration as the dispute resolution of choice within the African continent. The research project itself is titled ‘Creating a Sustainable Culture of Arbitration as a Mechanism for Commercial Dispute Resolution in Africa’. Over the four-year period, the role, in the development of arbitration in Africa, of four clearly identified stakeholders will be examined. These four stakeholders are: arbitration institutions; judiciaries; states/governments; and arbitration practitioners. This research project has a dedicated website: https://www.researcharbitrationafrica.com/ The project includes a series of conferences being held in African countries with each hosted by an arbitration institution and with the vast majority of speakers drawn from the African continent. With my location in Lon- don and its obvious limitations, I decided to find partners preferably from different regions of the continent and Francophone Africa (for inclusiveness). I approached a retired Kenyan Court of Appeal Judge and active international arbitrator, Edward Torgbor, and Dr Jean-Alain Penda Matipe from Cameroon, to join this project as co- convenors of the conferences. They both accepted. The SOAS Arbitration in Africa Conference Series In 2015, the Office of the General Counsel of the African Union Commission (AUC) hosted our first conference in the premises of the AUC in Addis Ababa. At this conference, we examined the role of arbitration institutions in the development of arbitration in Africa. Seventy-two people attended this conference. The major contri- bution of this conference to arbitration in Africa is my research on identifying and creating a list of 72 arbitration institutions operating in the continent. The International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA) has done further work on the basis of this research. In addition, Kluwer in 2016 published a collection from our deliberations at this conference titledThe Transformation of Arbitration in Africa: the Role of Arbitral Institutions, which I edited. In 2016, our conference was hosted by the Lagos Court of Arbitration in Lagos. At this conference, we examined the role of the judiciary and how they can better support the development of arbitration in Africa.

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