Advertisement for Union Carbide (National Geographic magazine, 1962)

We are confronted today with seemingly relentless disasters that are producing a great amount of suffering and loss. How should an international lawyer conduct herself in their wake? Resisting the temptation to construct our times as entirely unprecedented this presentation will attempt to delineate, and drawn on, the conduct of two ancestral figures, Justice Radhabinod Pal and Prof. Upendra Baxi, in response to disasters in their own time. Pal was the Indian Judge presiding in the Tokyo Tribunal in the aftermaths of the Second World War, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, and the era of formal colonialism in large parts of the world. Baxi is one of the main lawyers involved with the social movement campaign for justice in the aftermath of the ‘Bhopal Catastrophe’ in 1984, the largest industrial disaster in history.

Adil Hasan Khan is a PhD canditate in International Law at the Graduate Insitute of International and Developement Studies in Geneva. Currently he is a Junior Visiting Fellow at the IWM.

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