Australian Legal Education Forum: Responding to Conflict

Tuesday 13 July 2010

AUDIO recording available here 

Allan Scott Auditorium, UniSA City West campus, Hawke Building, 50-55 North Terrace, Adelaide

Jointly presented as part of the Annual Australian Law Students' Association 2010 Conference with The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre

This Forum - Responding to Conflict - concentrates on the issue of humanitarian intervention and its legal context.

Two main considerations are given attention; the responsibility of nation-states to protect their civilian population from the consequences of natural disasters and armed conflicts, and secondly, the legality and justification of external interventions in the event of nation-state failures to act responsibly. This session will also examine the use of state sovereignty to mask internal humanitarian problems, and awareness of them, among the international community.

Speakers:

• Grant Niemann - Senior Lecturer at Flinders University and Chair of the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law Committee in South Australia
• Phoebe Wynn-Pope - has undertaken project and emergency coordination roles respectively with the Australian Red Cross and CARE Australia
• Craig Jurisevic - Trauma Surgeon and former combatant in Kosovo

Biographies:

Grant Niemann is a senior lecturer in the School of Law at Flinders University. His areas of interest include International Law, International Criminal Law, International Humanitarian Law, Criminal Practice, Advocacy and Evidence.

Grant's legal career has included experience as the Principal Legal Advisor to the Northern Land Council, involved in land claims litigation and general legal work on behalf of the Aboriginal people of the top half of the NT and appointment as Deputy Director of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions Office in South Australia. Grant has held the position of Senior Trial Attorney for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague.

Grant also currently chairs the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law Committee in South Australia.

Phoebe Wynn-Pope has completed her Doctorate of Philosophy, addressing the effective operationalisation of the Responsibility to Protect(R2P) Principle. She is currently completing a project for Red Cross to exactly look at the relationship between R2P and International Humanitarian Law.

She is well qualified for this, having over ten years experience at the domestic and international level of CARE Australia. Her numerous roles at CARE have included experience in senior management of development operations, emergency management and communications. She coordinated CARE's Emergency Response program across Africa, Europe and the Middle East. She has experience working in the DRC, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Bosnia, and Serbia.

Craig Jurisevic was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1965 and is married with three children. He is a cardiothoracic and trauma surgeon and has worked in many conflict zones. These include Israel and Gaza (1992-93), Albania and Kosovo (1999), and with the Australian Army in East Timor (2006) and Afghanistan (2008). He is a member of the International Humanitarian Law Committee of the Australian Red Cross. He currently works full-time as a surgeon in Adelaide and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide.

While the views presented by speakers within the Hawke Centre public program are their own and are not necessarily those of either the University of South Australia or The Hawke Centre, they are presented in the interest of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of:strengthening our democracy - valuing our cultural diversity - and building our future.