Newsletter -February 2011

Inter-American Juridical Committee

The Inter-American Juridical Committee (CJI) will hold its seventy-eighth regular session at CJI headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 21 through April 1, 2011.

The CJI is the advisory body of the Organization of American States on juridical matters. Its main functions are to promote the progressive development and codification of international law, to study juridical problems concerning the integration of the developing countries in the Western Hemisphere, and to foster the process of legislative uniformity among the member countries.

The General Assembly, meeting in Lima in June 2010, called on the Committee to provide, inter alia, a legal study on the mechanisms of participative democracy and citizen participation included in the legislation of specific countries of the region, as well as a comparative analysis of the main legal instruments of the inter-American system with respect to peace, security, and cooperation. The General Assembly also called on the Committee to report on the progress made in its work in the areas of international humanitarian law, the International Criminal Court, refugees, freedom of thought and expression, and cultural diversity.

The Committee is made up of 11 jurists of the member states: Guilllermo Fernández of Soto (Chair), João Clemente Baena Soares (Vice Chair), Freddy Castillo Castellanos, Mauricio Herdocia Sacasa, Jean-Paul Hubert, Hyacinth Evadne Lindsay, Fabián Novak Talavera, Jorge Palacios Treviño, Miguel Pichardo Olivier, David P. Stewart, and Ana Elizabeth Villalta Vizcarra.

The agenda of the seventy-eighth regular session of the CJI is available (in Spanish) at the following link: http://www.oas.org/cji/temario_cji.htm

The Secretariat for Juridical Affair’s Department of International Law acts as the Technical Secretariat of the Inter-American Juridical Committee..

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