The York University Committee on Responsible Investing (YUACRI) is presenting “Responsible Investing: A Multi-Perspective Discussion” on Monday, Oct. 5, from 11:30am to 1pm in the Senate Chamber, N940, Ross Building, Keele campus. All are welcome.
In this the second panel on the subject hosted by YUACRI, two panelists with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints will consider the complexities and meaning of responsible investing.
Catherine Coumans
Gus Van Harten
The panel participants are Catherine Coumans, research coordinator and coordinator Asia-Pacific Program at MiningWatch Canada and Osgoode Hall Law School Professor Gus Van Harten.
As research coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, Coumans has coordinated and contributed to reports on a wide range of topics, some of which include full-cost accounting for mining, revitalizing economies of mining dependent communities, the role of the socially responsible investment industry, human rights impact assessment, 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.
She has provided expert testimony on mining in two congressional inquiries in the Philippines (1999, 2001), before the Constitutional Court in Indonesian (2005), and before the parliamentary committees in Canada and advisory panels as a subject matter expert.
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 (2007) and Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints: Judicial Restraint in Investment Treaty Arbitration (2013), as well as numerous academic articles, primarily on international investment law. He has an open-access research site and a new blog on investor-state arbitration. Most of his academic articles are freely available at http://ssrn.com/author=638855.
Van Harten is presently the Law Commission of Ontario’s scholar-in-residence at Osgoode Hall Law School. He is researching the relationship between investment treaties and regulatory change based on interviews with current and former government officials in Canada.