Welcome to the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment – a Network for the Creation of Change.
We are a global network of thinkers, researchers, policy-makers, opinion-formers and community activists whose diversity forges new conversations and relationships. We produce, exchange, and learn from world-leading scholarship and insights drawn from community-embedded experience and praxis at the interface between human rights and the environment all over the world.
The GNHRE Core Team is the organisational heart of the network, working passionately to ensure that the network produces genuine change, new initiatives, fresh relationships, and a better human and environmental future.
Core Team Members
Claudia Ituarte-Lima is the Director of GNHRE. As a recognized international public lawyer and scholar, Dr. Claudia Ituarte-Lima brings to the GNHRE over two decades of expertise in the intersection of international human rights, biodiversity and climate law and policy. She holds a PhD (University College London) and a MPhil (University of Cambridge) and is thematic lead on human rights and environment and senior researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute.
Liliana Lizarazo-Rodriguez is the Deputy Director of the GNHRE. She is the Research Professor of Sustainable Development Law and Sustainable Development and Global Governance at the Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). She is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) grant Curiae Virides. She holds honorary positions as Associate Researcher at IPIS research (Belgium) and Fellow at Sustainability College Bruges (Belgium). She is also the director of other research projects, such as the Horizon Europe MSC Mother Earth. At the VUB, she is also one of the promoters of the HOST project, the House of Sustainability Transitions and the Ecotrilema project.
Natalia Urzola Gutiérrez is a Chief Coordinating Officer. As a lawyer, her practice focuses on environmental, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law. Outside of her work with GNHRE, she also serves on the Board of Directors at the International Action Network for Gender Equity and Law and as an Editorial Board member at the Global Pandemic Network.
Victoria Lichet is also a Chief Coordinating Officer. She is a practicing attorney in New York and the Executive Director of the Global Pact Coalition, a UN-accredited NGO strategizing legal and advocacy actions to support ongoing negotiations towards a Global Pact for the Environment.
Special Responsibilities
Tim Blackman is the Technology Manager. He is Head of Security, Risk, and Compliance at a web development company focusing on maintaining a strong security posture and conforming with legal and regulatory requirements.
Rashmi Gupta is the Research Repository manager. She is an energy and environmental lawyer with a Master’s in energy & clean technology law, and environmental law from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on clean energy, climate change, and human rights laws.
Uday Shankar is a Membership Manager. He is currently Registrar & Professor of Law at Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur. Outside of the GNHRE, he is also a member of the International Association of Constitutional Law and the Indian Law Institute, Delhi.
Melanie Montalban is a Membership Manager. Outside of her work at GNHRE, she serves as the Managing Lawyer, Australian Capital Territory at the Environmental Defenders Office and is a Senior Co-Chair of the Subcommittee on Environment and Human Rights at Australian Lawyers for Human Rights. Melanie specializes in administrative, environmental, refugee, human rights, and international law.
Linnéa Nordlander is a Membership Manager. She is currently an Assistant Professor of sustainability and human rights at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Her research investigates the intersection of human rights and climate change law, focusing especially on how human rights law can serve to enhance and enforce states’ climate change mitigation ambition.
Rosemary Mwanza is a blog editor. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stockholm University and holds a PhD from the University of Eastern Finland and part of the Center for Climate Change, Energy, and Environment Law. Previously, Rosemary has taught international environmental law at the University of Eastern Finland Law School and has worked at the Public Defender’s Office in Orange County, CA.
Cleverline Brown is a blog editor with the GNHRE. She is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law of the Rivers State University Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and has previously practiced law in Nigeria. Her research interests are in environmental compliance and enforcement practices, oil and gas law, criminal law, and information technology.
Sumudu Atapattu is a blog editor with the GNHRE. She is the Associate Director of the Global Legal Studies Center and Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Law School and lectures in international environmental law. Currently, she sits on the advisory board of the McGill International Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy.
Regional Representatives
Africa
Clive Vinti is the Regional Director of Africa. He also serves as part of the Executive Committee of the Environmental Law Association of South Africa. Previously, Clive has also worked with the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research (FHISER) on the state of basic service delivery in the Eastern Cape for the United National Development Programme (UNDP).
Caiphas Brewster Soyapi is the Deputy Director of Africa. He is a researcher based at the North-West University (NWU), South Africa (SA). His research interests currently focus primarily on environmental constitutionalism within Africa, exploring rights-based approaches to environmental protection. Within this space, he broadly explores rights-based approaches to environmental protection, the place of international environmental law principles in African courts, and African judicial environmentalism.
Angela Kariuki is the Deputy Director of Africa. She is a programme management officer at the United Nations Environmental Programme and has previously worked at the South African Human Rights Commission, where she worked on issues pertaining to constitutional environmental rights, small scale mining, rural development, and natural resource management.
Asia
Uday Shankar is the Regional Director of Asia. He is a Registrar & Professor of Law at Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur. He has been teaching and researching law for more than 19 years. He has served as guest professor under the Magdalene Schoch Fellowship awarded by the University of Hamburg and is a Life Member of the Indian Law Institute, Delhi.
Pankaj Karn is the Deputy Director of Asia. He is a Kathmandu-based constitutional, civil rights and human rights lawyer, and has successfully litigated a wide range of constitutional, civil, and human rights and environmental issues in the Supreme Court of Nepal. He also serves as the General Secretary of the Public Defender Society Nepal, which provides legal aid to marginalized Nepalese communities.
Pacific
Paul Govind is the Regional Director of the Pacific. Paul is a Lecturer at the School of Law and Deputy Director of the Centre of Environmental Law, at Macquarie University, Australia where he teaches environmental planning law and climate law. His research interests include ethics in environmental law, including rights and responsibilities/obligations, across domestic, transnational and international contexts.
Miguel Frohlich is the Deputy Director of the Pacifc. Miguel is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Futures, Queensland University, Australia. In the past three years, Miguel has been focused on investigating ways to facilitate the development of a sustainable blue economy, with an emphasis on energy transition and decarbonisation strategies that can accelerate the deployment of ocean renewable energy, such as offshore wind, wave and tidal energy.
THE CARRIBEAN
Lisa Benjamin is the Regional Director of the Caribbean. She is an Assistant Professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland Oregon. Lisa received her BA from McGill University, her LL.B. from University College London, her LL.M. from the University of London, and her PhD from the University of Leicester. She teaches courses on climate change, energy resources, and environmental justice.
Alana Lancaster is the Deputy Director of the Caribbean. She is the former Director of the Environmental Management Division of the Environmental Protection Agency of Guyana and a Lecturer in International Environmental & Energy Law at the University of the West Indies. Recently, she was appointed to the Executive Team of the One Ocean Hub.
Europe
Annalisa Savaresi is the Regional Director of Europe. She is an Associate Professor of International Environmental Law at the University of Eastern Finland Center for Climate Change, Energy, and Environmental Law. She also holds a research post at the University of Stirling, UK as well as visiting posts at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy, and at the University of La Sabana, Colombia.
Margaretha Wewerinke Singh is the Deputy Director of Europe. She is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies (Leiden University) and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Environmental Law at the Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (University of the South Pacific). She is also an Attorney at Blue Ocean Law, a boutique international law firm based in Guam specialising in human and indigenous rights, self-determination and environmental justice in the Pacific.
North America
Freya Doughty-Wagner is the Regional Director of North America, GNHRE’s website manager, and the writer of the weekly newsletter. She is also the Chief Content Officer for the American Branch of the International Law Association. Doughty-Wagner’s research focuses on the right to a healthy environment for youth and children. Outside of the GNHRE, she is a member of the Childhood, Law & Policy Network and UWE Bristol’s Research in Public International Law research group.
Erin Dobbelsteyn is the Deputy Director of North America. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Ottawa and a Schulich Fellow at Dalhousie University. Her doctoral research is at the intersection of public and planetary health, human rights, and environmental law and she recently represented Friends of the Earth Canada as an intervener in Mathur v Ontario, the first human rights-based climate change Charter application in Canada to have a hearing on the merits.
Latin America
Héctor Herrera is the Regional Director of Latin America. He holds a law degree from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and has a Master’s in Public Policy from Colombia’s Universidad Nacional. He is a Ph.D. researcher at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), Belgium, researching urban climate finance with a climate justice perspective in Mexico City and Cape Town.
Our programmes and projects
The GNHRE hosts a number of ongoing programmes and projects:
- The Summer/Winter School hosted in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme;
- The Escazú Agreement Project, headed by GNHRE’s Latin America team
- The Climate Litigation in the Global South Project, organised and coordinated by Maria Antonia Tigre and Melanie Murcott)
- The Mentorship Programme, coordinated by Natalia Urzola
- The Book Launch series, coordinated by Erin Daly and Dina Lupin.
Blog series and symposia
You can read our blog series here:
Special Thanks
Special thanks to our Patrons, Ms Bianca Jagger, Dr Vandana Shiva, Sir Jonathon Porritt, Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Dr Parvez Hassan for their willingness to support the network.
Special thanks to Bristol Centre for Legal Research at Bristol Law School, UWE, for past financial sponsorship of this important project.
Special thanks to Liz Falconer, who gave us our first website in an act of extraordinary generosity.
Special thanks to Tim Blackman, our tireless technical manager, for his commitment to the importance of an idea that his crazy academic colleagues got passionate about over some scribbled notes and a cup of tea—and for making that early vision a reality— often on his own, unpaid time.
Special thanks to all our members, linked organisations and networks for their willingness to link efforts around the globe in the search for sustainable, health-giving, enriching, ecologically vibrant futures in which diversity is celebrated and injustice is confronted. Together, we can change thinking and change futures.
We welcome any support to supplement the hard work that the core team members do in order to keep the network as fully serviced as we can. To support this project financially, or in any other way, please contact us on gnhrewebsite@gmail.com