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Due to the recent labour disruption, the panel discussion “Responsible Investing: A Multi-Perspective Discussion” has been postponed until further notice.
A forum of three panellists with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints will consider the complexities and meaning of responsible investing next month.
This is the second panel discussion hosted by the York University Advisory Committee on Responsible Investing.
The event, “Responsible Investing: A Multi-Perspective Discussion,” will take place March 10, from 11:30am to 1pm, in the Senate Chamber, N940 Ross Building, Keele campus. The event is open to all York University community members.
The panellists are as follows:
Catherine Coumans is a research coordinator and coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Program, Mining Watch Canada. She has coordinated and contributed to reports on a wide range of topics such as full-cost accounting for mining, revitalizing economies of mining-dependent communities, the role of the socially responsible investment industry, human rights impact assessment, submarine tailings disposal, deep sea mining, participatory health assessment and participatory research with women in mining-affected communities and with women mine workers.
Her policy research and work is currently focused on corporate accountability (standards, verification, certification systems, due diligence, judicial and non-judicial grievance mechanisms), mining and development, and home country legislative reform to assure access to justice for people who have been harmed by Canadian mining companies overseas.
Coumans has provided expert testimony on mining in two congressional inquiries in the Philippines (1999, 2001), before the Constitutional Court in Indonesia (2005), before the Parliamentary committees in Canada (Sub-Committee on Human Rights and Democratic Development in Canada, 2005; Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Democratic Development, 2009) and in an Amici Brief for the Supreme Court of the United States (2008).
In 2006, Coumans was asked by the government of Canada to participate on an advisory group for the Canadian government’s national roundtables on corporate social responsibility and the Canadian extractive industry in developing countries. She has participated in several Canadian government-led, multi-stakeholder processes on mining. She sat on the executive committee of the multi-stakeholder Canadian Centre for Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility Extractive Resources (2009-12).
Gus Van Harten is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. Previously, he was a faculty member at the London School of Economics Law Department. He authored Investment Treaty Arbitration and Public Law (OUP, 2007) and Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints: Judicial Restraint in Investment Treaty Arbitration (OUP, 2013), as well as several academic articles, primarily in international investment law.
Van Harten has an open-access research site, iiapp.org, and new blog on investor-state arbitration, gusvanharten.wordpress.com. Most of his academic articles are freely available at ssrn.com/author=638855. He is presently the Law Commission of Ontario’s scholar in residence at Osgoode Hall Law School, researching the relationship between investment treaties and regulatory change based on interviews with current and former government officials in Canada.
Kevin Skerrett is a senior research officer with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). He has spent most of his 20 years at CUPE assigned to pension issues ranging from collective bargaining to trustee support and public policy.
He also spent a year working as a research officer at the International Labour Organization’s Bureau for Workers’ Activities in 2009, and helped launch a new International Journal of Labour Research. While on sabbatical in 2013, he served as a visiting scholar at York University’s Global Labour Research Centre.