Last week Rohan Nanda and I presented our paper ‘Trust Through Transparency’ at the ICON-S Benelux conference in Leiden (26–27 October). The theme this year was trust in transnational governance, which suited our topic well.
Marine genetic resources (the genetic material of marine organisms, used for enzymes, medicines, and other products) are governed by several overlapping instruments. Inside a State’s waters, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol apply. On the high seas, the BBNJ Agreement has applied since January this year. In the EU, Regulation 511/2014 adds duties for companies and researchers. Each instrument was written at a different time and uses its own terms.
So a simple question, such as whether a company owes anything for a product made from high-seas samples, takes a lot of reading across texts. Ministries and large firms can afford that. Small island States, local communities, and smaller companies often cannot, and they end up relying on the system without being able to check it. This is why capacity building, one of the pillars of the BBNJ Agreement, matters as much as the rules themselves. It also affects marine scientists, who collect and share these resources and are often the first to meet these rules in practice.
In our talk we presented a way of mapping the provisions of these instruments and the links between them, so that each step of the legal answer can be traced back to a specific text. We are developing this within BlueLab, our Comenius Teaching Fellowship at Maastricht University. In legal education, students will work through cases like this one and learn to check AI-assisted analysis against the legal texts.
Many thanks to the organisers and to everyone on the panel for the questions, which have given us plenty to work on.
