UCT Law and Science Students Head to Copenhagen

An interdisciplinary group of students, from the Science and Law Faculties, supervised by Micha Young from the Law Faculty’s Institute of Marine & Environmental Law, will be heading to Copenhagen in October this year. Julia Rushton and Daniel Sive, who are both Law students and Takunda Chitaka and Timothy Magezi from the Chemical Engineering Department were selected as one of seven teams from universities all over the world to partake in the oral rounds of an international negotiations competition. The competition, which is organised, hosted and funded by the University of Copenhagen, is centred around the negotiation of a Sustainable Energy Trade Agreement. The aim of this Agreement, to be negotiated by the teams, each of which represents a fictional state, is to liberalise trade in environmental goods. As part of the written submissions, each team was required to propose one product to be added to the list of “free trade” environmental goods. This required a scientific analysis to underpin the nature of the product as an environmental good; as well as a legal analysis of international trade rules. The team now awaits receipt of the written submissions prepared by the competing universities and will then commence preparations for the oral rounds.