Ms. Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger,
Canada,
CISDL Director

mcsegger@cisdl.org

Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger, MEM (Yale), BCL & LL.B (McGill) is a leading international lawyer in the field of sustainable development. She is Director of the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL) in Canada, and a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law (LRCIL) at Cambridge University Faculty of Law in the United Kingdom. She is also head of International Affairs for the Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources. She has authored / edited ten books on sustainable development law and policy, including Sustainable Development Law: Principles, Practices and Prospects (Oxford University Press, 2004) with A. Khalfan; Sustainable Justice: Reconciling Economic, Social and Environmental Law (Martinus Nijhoff, 2004) with former Vice-President of the International Court of Justice, Judge C. G. Weeramantry; and Sustainable Development in World Trade Law (Kluwer Law International, 2005) with Dr. M. Gehring.

With the CISDL, she serves as senior legal advisor to countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia on the implementation of sustainable development accords, including trade and investment agreements, the Cartegena Protocol and the Kyoto Protocol, and she trains senior officials and high court judges in these areas. She also lectures in law for the International Development Law Organisation, the United Nations, and several law schools.

She serves on the boards of the International Law Association (Canadian Branch) and the International Trade and Investment Centre (Conference Board of Canada), as the Canadian expert representative on the International Law Association’s (ILA) Committee on International Law on Sustainable Development, and as a Chair of the IUCN Environmental Law Commissions’ Expert Group on Trade and Environment Law. She also chairs a joint CISDL – ILA – IDLO Partnership on International Law for Sustainable Development, launched at the World Summit for Sustainable Development. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, is profiled by the United Nations Environment Programme in their global ‘Who’s Who of Women and the Environment’, has twice been appointed an AVINA Fellowship, and has held several valuable international awards including a Chevening and a SSHRC Fellowship for a Ph.D. in International Law at Oxford University (Exeter College).