Keynote speakers

Tarja Halonen served two terms as President of Finland from 2000 to 2012. Prior to her election, she held the office of Minister of Social Affairs and Health, Minister of Justice, and Minister for Foreign Affairs. She continues to work closely with the UN, and is currently member of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation and she is also alternate co-chair of the Every Woman Every Child Movement’s Steering Group and UN Land Ambassador as well as a member of CTBTO Group of Eminent Persons.

She continues to promote issues related to sustainable development in her many other roles, including, as a member of Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s Leadership Council, as a member of Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development and as a Chair of Lancet-SIGHT commission on Peaceful Societies through Health and Gender Equality.

In Finland, she serves as the Chair of the Board of the University of Helsinki, is a member of the Board of SITRA and is also chairing the Board of the Finnish National Gallery.

Nigel Bankes is professor of law and holder of the chair of natural resources law at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada where he has taught since 1984. Bankes also held an adjunct appointment as professor of law with the KG Jebsen Centre for the Law of the Sea, at UiT (the University of Tromsø), the Arctic University of Norway from 2012 to 2019. Bankes has written extensively on a broad range of resource and energy law matters in both domestic and international law with special interests in Arctic issues and the intersection between resource development and the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Profile: University of Galgary

Professor of International Law and Director of the Center for Climate Change, Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Eastern Finland. She holds an OTM degree from the University of Helsinki and LL.M and PhD in Law degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was a member of Finland's statutory Climate Change Panel in 2014-2019 and has extensive experience from multidisciplinary climate change research, including an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. Her research focuses on climate change and WTO law. She is also interested in international legal theory, including themes related law and globalisation, such as global (environmental) law and transnational (environmental) law. Kati is also affiliated with the Institute for European Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels and the Erik Castren Institute for International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki.

I am Professor of Cooperative Law at the University of Helsinki and Professor of Law at the University of Oslo. Previously, I held the chair of commercial law law at the University of Turku Faculty of Law, being the last years the Dean of the Faculty. At the University of Helsinki I am the co-PI at Shaping, fixing and making markets via IPR: regulating sustainable innovation ecosystems (SHARE) project and at the University of Oslo, deputy head of the Research Group Companies, Markets, Society and the and leader of the UiO:Nordic Research Group Futuring Sustainable Nordic Business Models. I teach nowadays mostly cooperative law and corporate sustainability at Helsinki and law and economics at Oslo. In research my fields of expertise are company law, corporate governance, accounting and auditing law, finance and securities law as well as law and economics. I have written several books and articles either alone or with colleagues on these subjects in English, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish. Now I work mainly with articles concerning sustainable business models, digitalisation and cooperativism, sustainability reporting, institutional investors, public market actors and theoretical framework on the regulatory dynamics between the public and the private. I am member of the board of the University of Turku.

Profile: University of Helsinki
Profile: University of Oslo

Dr. juris, (eq. PhD in law) (2008), is professor and head of the Research Group on Sámi and Indigenous People Law at the Faculty of law, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, and adjunct professor at Sámi University for applied sciences, Kautokeino. His field of research is indigenous people’s law, property law with particular focus on land rights claims in the Sápmi areas, human rights and legal history. For publications in English, see here.

Professor Ravna teaches Sámi and Indigenous People’s Law and property law. Ravna has published the monographies Same- og reindriftsrett [Sámi and reindeer husbandry law] (2019), Finnmarksloven – og retten til jorden i Finnmark [The Finnmark Act and the rights to the land in Finnmark] (2013) og Rettsutgreiing og bruksordning i reindriftsområder (2008). He is editor-in-chief of Arctic Review on Law and Politics www.arcticreview.no.

Ravna is also a documentary author, publishing several documentaries on Indigenous People, the High North including life and livelihood in the Russian North. His last documentary is named Fra Little Bighorn til Standing Rock: En modern indianerhistorie (2018).