2024 Kirby Seminar List

European Union Deforestation Regulation 2023 as an example of regulating the supply chains of companies to protect the environment globally

Adjunct Professor Anu Lahteenmaki-Uutela, Adjunct Professor, University of Turku, Finland Senior Research Scientist at Finnish Environment Institute

In-person and online: 12 noon AEST Thursday 18 July 2024

On Campus:  EBL Lecture Theatre 3, Building W40, UNE Business School

In this Kirby Seminar, Adjunct Professor Anu Lahteenmaki-Uutela will discuss the following questions: European consumption is a major driver of global deforestation. To combat this problem, European Union Deforestation Regulation starts to apply in December 2024. Only deforestation-free soy, palm oil, beef, coffee, cocoa, timber, rubber, and derived products can be sold in Europe. Companies must follow each batch to the production site.

Lähteenmäki-Uutela will speak about how European companies and states are preparing for implementation. Lähteenmäki-Uutela will use coffee and cocoa sectors as examples to describe the challenges in building transparent supply chains with millions of smallholder farmers. She will also discuss the plans of the EU to expand the law to other ecosystem types and other economic sectors, potential impacts of EU laws on global trade flows, and the plans of other countries to enact similar legislation.

Anu Lahteenmaki is a Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Environment and Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. She previously taught business law and responsible business at Turku School of Economics. Her current research topics include biodiversity and trade, agriculture and water protection, sustainable aquaculture, just sustainability transition, and fundamental rights

A Living Corpse: Invisible Individuals under the Death Sentence

Associate Professor Mai Sato, Faculty of Law, Monash University

In-person and online: 12 noon AEST Thursday 18 July 2024

Lewis Seminar Room, Room 30, Building WO38, School of Law

To obtain the webinar link, please register for this Kirby Seminar.

In this Kirby Seminar, Associate Professor Mai Sato will explain that the body of the executed is the obvious and inevitable outcome of the death penalty. However, to reduce the death penalty to the act of taking away life does not capture the full extent of the punishment. The death penalty begins when an individual is labelled by the State as worthy of death. Individuals live, often for years, under the death sentence. Focusing on Japanese prisoners, this presentation examines what is often an invisible, hard to research, aspect of the death penalty: how individuals live on death row. Much of the Japanese death penalty process is invisible. The Government does not release information on how prisoners are executed, the treatment of death row prisoners or the process of selecting who on death row is to be executed. This presentation uses rare photographs of penal institutions in Japan obtained by an NGO and findings from a survey of individuals on death row conducted by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations. It analyses the experiences of individuals on death row glimpsed from photographs, and a survey describes how access to both data was achieved and examines aspects of the death penalty that remain invisible.

Mai Sato is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Monash University. She is the inaugural director of Eleos Justice, a collaboration between Capital Punishment Justice Project, an NGO working to end the death penalty, and Monash University Faculty of Law. Eleos is committed to the restriction and abolition of the death penalty in Asia.

Mai is a social scientist by education and has led and worked on projects on the death penalty in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. Her monograph The Death Penalty in Japan: Will the Public Tolerate Abolition? (Springer, 2014), and her documentary film which captured a social experiment exploring what the death penalty meant to ordinary Japanese citizens, influenced the decision by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations to become an abolitionist organisation in 2016. Mai’s interest in the death penalty is not limited to scholarly understanding of punishment and the criminal justice system. After completing a European Commission-funded project, Mai created and co-runs an NGO CrimeInfo, for abolition of the Japanese death penalty.

The Seminar recording for this event will not be available until after the 6^th of August 2024.

TBA

In-person and online: 12 noon AEST Monday 2 September 2024

TBA