Rights and Power in Genomic Data-Sharing: Access-Benefit and Virus Justice in Montreal

With Benedict Kingsbury 

Developing countries and their scientists have tended to receive little benefit and recognition for their supply of genomic sequence data to bit global databanks. Protests from Africa and Asia, and anxieties in richer countries about recent and potential future epidemics, have begun to precipitate change. Legal and regulatory venues for this include the WHO, the UN Convention on Biodiversity access-benefit arrangements (updated in December 2022 in Montreal), the rules of the major genomic sequence-sharing infrastructures (INSDC and GISAID), and the policies of funders and journals.  This presentation considers what kinds of justice regimes are emerging in these different venues, how they fit together, and what this tells us about human rights in private and public global regulatory governance.  

Bio 

Professor Benedict Kingsbury, originally from New Zealand, is Vice Dean of New York University (NYU) Law School, Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) and leads NYU's Guarini Global Law & Tech initiative. His writings have ranged across history of international law, indigenous peoples’ issues, and global administrative law.  His current work and NYU courses focus especially global data law; infrastructure, rights, and regulation; hybrid and private governance; law and global ordering projects; and international legal approaches to planetary and space issues. He delivered the Lauterpacht Lectures at Cambridge University in November 2022 on International Law Futures.