Law and Society Webinar Series – Curfews, Lockdowns And Human Rights

Emergency Orders and Justice on the Streets

Mr. Wayne R. Munroe, Q.C., Principal, Munroe & Associates

Emergency Orders: – Balancing Safety and Rights

Dr. Arif Bulkan, Senior Lecturer, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

Emergency Orders in a Disparate Society

Dr. Nicolette Bethel, Chair, Social Sciences, University of The Bahamas

Tonya Bastian Galanis

Principal
Eugene Dupuch Law School

Mrs. Galanis is an Attorney-at-Law and serves on several Committees of the Council of Legal Education. She serves on the Ethics Committee of The Bahamas Bar Association, the Law Faculty Board of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus and the Law Faculty Advisory Board of the University of The Bahamas.

Mrs. Galanis is an active member of several civic and community organizations. She is the Registrar of the Anglican Diocese of The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands and is a former Chairman of the Securities Commission of The Bahamas.

Mr. Wayne R. Munroe, Q.C.

Principal
Munroe & Associates

Wayne Roosevelt Munroe is the principal in the firm of Munroe & Associates. He is a noted civil litigator. He is known for his innovative approach to litigation. He is sought after for complex and groundbreaking cases. He is known to excel in cases of first impression. He has appeared in all court of The Bahamas, including the Judicial Committee of Her Majesty’s Privy Council which serves as the final appellate court for The Bahamas.

He is a member of the Bar of England and Wales having been admitted as a member of the Upper Bar by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple in July 1990. He is also a member of the Bahamas Bar having been admitted in August 1990. He was appointed one of Her Majesty’s Counsel learned in the law by Letters Patent on the 8th day of January 2015. He has served The Bahamas in a judicial capacity having been appointed and acted as a Stipendiary and Circuit Magistrate from 1999 to 2001. He has also served as an Acting Justice of the Supreme Court of The Bahamas from October to December 2012.

He has served as President of the Bahamas Bar Association and Chairman of the Bahamas Bar Council from 2003 to 2006. He is also a member of the Organization of Commonwealth Caribbean Bar Association.

Mr. Munroe was appointed an Associate Tutor in Advocacy by the Council of Legal Education for the West Indies in 2000 and still holds that appointment. He tutors Advocacy at the Council’s Eugene Dupuch Law School situate in New Providence, Bahamas.

Dr. Arif Bulkan

Senior Lecturer
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

Arif Bulkan joined the Faculty of Law at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies in September 2008 and transferred to the St Augustine campus in January 2012. He currently teaches Constitutional Law, Commonwealth Caribbean Human Rights Law, International Human Rights Law and Law and Legal Systems in the LLB programme. His other interests include Criminal Law and Environmental Law.

Prior to joining the Faculty of Law Arif Bulkan practiced law in Guyana, first at the Chambers of the Director of Public Prosecutions, where he left as Assistant DPP in 1996, and then in private practice from 1999 to 2004. He obtained his PhD in law on the subject of the land rights of indigenous peoples in Guyana from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in 2008, and is one of the few experts on the emerging legal framework dealing with the rights of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean.

Dr Bulkan has published on democracy, the rule of law and constitutionalism in the Caribbean, the rights of indigenous persons, environmental law, and Caribbean human rights law. He has also provided expert advice as a consultant on human rights, environmental law, indigenous law and HIV/AIDS and the law to regional and international non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations, and has worked in law and policy reform in the areas of indigenous rights, natural resource extraction laws and health and human rights.

Dr. Nicolette Bethel

Chair, Social Sciences
University of The Bahamas

Nicolette Bethel holds a BA (Hons) in Literature and French from the University of Toronto, and an MPhil and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She works at the University of The Bahamas.

She was born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas. She has lived, studied and worked in the UK and Canada, and served as Director of Culture for the Bahamas for five years (2003-2008). She is the founder of the Shakespeare in Paradise theatre festival (est. 2009) and Ringplay Productions theatre company (est. 2001). She was the founder and editor-in-chief of tongues of the ocean, an online literary journal (2009-2014). She is a playwright, poet, fiction writer, anthropologist and theatre director. In 2015, she was short-listed for the Hollick Arvon Prize in Poetry of the Bocas Literary Festival, and her submissions have been featured in Thicker than Water (Peekash, 2018). Other publications have appeared in Social Identities, The Oxford and Cambridge May Anthologies 1993, The Caribbean Writer, Calabash, The Caribbean Review of Books, Poui, and sx: Small Axe Salon. In 2010 her first poetry chapbook, Mama Lily and the Dead was published by Poinciana Paper Press; her second chapbook, Lent/Elegies, was published by the A Place Without Dust Nanopress in 2011, and in 2015 a third collection of poems was published in If, a publication designed to accompany the installation of the same name in Transforming Spaces 2015.

She lives in Nassau with her husband, Philip Burrows, a theatre director.

Mr. Joseph Gaskins, Jr.

Communications and Policy
Strategist
Moderator

Joseph Gaskins Jr., affectionately called Joey, graduated from Ithaca College with a BA in Politics. He also obtained an MSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics.

He is especially skilled in qualitative research, strategic communications and media, and government relations.
Joey has worked for non-profits and political campaigns in Washington, DC where he started his career at the Human Rights Campaign.

After leading communications and special projects in the Office of the Attorney-General of The Bahamas, Joey consulted for other government agencies, multilateral organizations and private clients in the areas of public and government relations, communications and policy.

He is now a founding partner of Open Current.

The Caribbean Association of Judicial Officers (CAJO) provides a host of judicial education engagements for judicial officers across the region including its Biennial Conference, training programmes and workshops on various topics and areas of law and practice, and a biannual Newsletter, CAJO News.

APEX is a Caribbean-based, special-purpose, not-for-profit agency created by the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and dedicated to the delivery of technology-enabled solutions and capacity building services to support the needs of courts, law offices and related institutions in the region.

Connected Caribbean is a volunteer-based regional non-profit organization dedicated to promoting values-based initiatives in support of Caribbean integration and Caribbean development.

The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States is an inter-governmental organization dedicated to economic harmonization and integration, protection of human and legal rights, and the encouragement of good governance between countries and territories in the Eastern Caribbean.