Task Force on Illicit Financial Flows, Poverty and Human Rights - Task Force Members
Professor Stephen B Cohen
Since 1980, Professor 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. His writings include a casebook on federal income taxation and various articles on tax and corporate law and on national security and foreign policy. He has also taught at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Heidelberg University, Germany.
Sternford Moyo
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.
Sternford is the Senior Partner and Chairman of the 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 Sternford’s primary areas of practice are mining, commercial and corporate law, he has assisted in complex litigation of constitutional matters and 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 post graduate law students in 1981.
Professor Robin Palmer
Robin Palmer is Director of the Institute for Professional Legal Training (IPLT), which is affiliated to the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, and a practising advocate (barrister). From 1992 he was Director of the Law Clinic and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Natal (later University of KwaZulu-Natal), leaving formal employment with the University as an Associate Professor in 2009. He concurrently practised as an advocate (barrister) at the KwaZulu-Natal Bar, where he has been involved in numerous high-profile cases, including 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. He has also completed various training courses and consultancies for the UNDP, UNODC, OSI, OSISA, the Commonwealth, USAID, GIZ, DFID, the SA 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.
His 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.
Thomas Pogge (Chair)
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. His recent publications (see pantheon.yale.edu/~tp4) 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, Pogge’s current work is focused on a team effort towards developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide (www.healthimpactfund.org).
Professor Celia Wells
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.
Celia’s research is mainly in criminal law, with a particular specialism in corporate criminal liability. She is the author of Corporations and Criminal Responsibility (2nd edition, OUP 2001) and of Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Nicola Lacey and Oliver Quick, Fourth Edition, Cambridge University Press 2010). 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 Bribery Act 2010, S7).
Lloyd Lipsett, President (Rapporteur)
Lloyd is an international lawyer with 15 years of specialisation in human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and corporate social responsibility.
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 China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Philippines, Peru and Argentina.
Lloyd’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.
Shirley Pouget
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 interconnected concepts. 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 (Thailand and Syria); 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 have been eroded (Myanmar (Burma)).
Before joining the IBAHRI, Shirley worked as a cabinet member of Andre Vallini, President of the Isère council, France (Conseil Géneral d’Isère) and Senator mainly advising on French justice reform and criminal draft legislation.