Transnational environmental litigation in Taiwan: A bright spot in business and human rights law
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS University of London, 10 Thornhaugh St, London WC1H 0XG
- Room
- R201
About this event
This public lecture is about the Business and Human Rights litigation in Taiwan.
Access to State-based judicial mechanisms is a key aspect of access to remedy, which forms the so-called Third Pillar of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (BHR). BHR scholarship has so far focused on litigation in Western Europe, North America, Australia and South Africa. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese experience with BHR, including environmental, litigation, shows that cutting-edge developments are also occurring outside the Western world.
In our paper, which is forthcoming in the Cambridge Handbook on BHR Litigation, we focus on two pieces of transnational environmental litigation in Taiwanese courts, the Radio Corporation of America case, which concerns soil and groundwater pollution in Taoyuan, Taiwan, and the Formosa Ha Tinh case, which concerns marine pollution in Vietnam. We demonstrate that Taiwanese courts have made some progressive decisions in these two cases and that, therefore, and despite some setbacks, the Taiwanese experience represents a bright spot in BHR law that can offer valuable lessons to other legal systems.
Attendance
This event is walk-in based and open to public.
Meet the speaker
Professor Uglješa Grušić
Uglješa Grušić is Professor of Private International Law at the Faculty of Laws of University College London. His expertise lies in the regulation of transnational employment contracts, tortious claims arising out of the external exercise of British executive authority and civil claims against multinational enterprises for human rights violations.
He is one of five main legal experts for the United Nations Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Respect to Human Rights and a member of the International Law Association Committee on Business and Human Rights. In 2023/2024, he was a visiting scholar at the Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
Dr. Sung-Mao Huang
Dr. Sung-Mao Huang is Associate Research Professor of Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He is the first individual in Taiwan to obtain a joint doctoral degree in law, from Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) and National Taiwan University, and was honored with the 2023 Wu Ta-You Memorial Award.
His expertise encompasses Taiwanese Civil Law, particularly contract law, tort law and the reform of obligation law. Dr. Huang contributed to the Ministry of Justice's Study Group on the Reform of Taiwanese Obligation Law for over two years.
