From October 22 to 26, the OAS Secretary for Legal Affairs, Jean-Michel Arrighi, and the Director of the Secretariat’s Department of International Law, Dante Negro, led a variety of courses on the inter-American system at Chile’s Diplomatic Academy at the invitation of that institution and that of its Director, Ambassador Miguel Ángel González. The Academy has offered a course on international law since 1975 in order to provide government officials in Chile and other countries with instruction that will assist them in the discharge of their future diplomatic duties. Both the Coordinator of the Course, Mrs. Natalia Escobar Ramírez, and Ambassador Pedro Oyarce, former Permanent Representative of Chile to the OAS, organized this activity which this year hosted 31 course participants: 14 of them were Chilean nationals, while 17 hailed from other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Nigeria and Azerbaijan.
The courses, imparted over the span of one week, addressed topics relating to the origins of the inter-American system, the structure and workings of the OAS, democracy in the region, electoral observation and other election-related missions, new legal developments in the inter-American system through model laws and legislative guides, and international legal cooperation.
On October 25 the Academy organized a colloquium on the Inter-American Democratic Charter attended by more than 40 experts on the subject, including Senator José Miguel Insulza, former OAS Secretary General; Mr. José Octavio Bordón González, Argentina’s Ambassador in Chile; Dr. Antonia Urrejola, member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; as well as parliamentary deputies, government officials, and scholars. The OAS Secretary for Legal Affairs gave a presentation on the evolution of legal instruments in the Hemisphere.
This initiative, which it is hoped will be repeated at other academies in the region that so request, fulfills one of the mandates of the Inter-American Program for the Development of International Law (adopted in 1997 and updated in 2011), which is to develop closer ties with diplomatic academies in order to increase awareness of the inter-American system’s legal heritage and of the latest political and legal developments in the Organization’s framework.
