News

Rome, July 5, 2013 – The International Development Law Organization celebrated the graduation of 24 participants from a record 20 countries who enrolled in the training course “The Dos and Don’ts of Technology Licensing for Developing Countries”.

IDLO’s Judit Arenas* has highlighted the rule-of-law aspects of securing justice for children in the developing world. Speaking at an EU-UNICEFconference in Brussels, she described children as highly vulnerable.

IDLO Director-General Irene Khan has spoken strongly in favor of incorporating gender concerns into any effort to reform Bangladesh’s weak labor safety culture. Speaking in Paris, at a panel discussion on Business and Human Rights hosted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Ms.

The Conference of the UN’s food agency, FAO, is taking place this week, against a backdrop of mixed news. Dozens of countries have halved the number of their citizens going hungry, meeting a key component of the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) three years before the target date of 2015. The other component, extreme poverty eradication, is also making great strides.

IDLO welcomes the decision by the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Council to push back to July 2021 a deadline for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to meet their Intellectual Property obligations.

“Biodiversity is not about saving one plant or bird at a time.”

So what is it about?

“Linkages,” explains IDLO’s Yolanda Saito, before pointing out that we should stop worrying about this or that cuddly species, and focus on the whole.

May 9, 2013 - The head of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of Bangladesh, Mizanur Rahman, has described the loss of life at the collapsed Rana Plaza textile factory as one of the most tragic incidents in his country’s recent history – but he insisted that any pullout by Western clothes retailers from what is seen as a severely tainted industry would be catastrophic for local workers.

The International Development Law Organization received a delegation from Thailand’s King Prajadhipok Institute (KPI). The visitors were briefed on how IDLO seeks to build confidence in the justice system from the perspective of the end-user, as well as the organization’s current programmes, field operations and research projects.

Today (Friday April 19) marks a milestone in IDLO’s involvement in South Sudan, as the final sixteen-strong class graduates from one of the organization’s most transformative courses. With funding from the US State Department through its law enforcement arm (INL), the training has covered both the fundamentals of common law and what is known as ‘legal English’.

“I am here to say to you that we need IDLO, and if it did not exist today, we would have to invent it – because it does something that must be done, and [that] so far, no one else in the world is doing.” The statement, by Assistant US Secretary of State for Narcotics and Law Enforcement William Brownfield, came as he opened a congressional briefing on Thursday, April 11th.