About the author

Dr Christine Frison is an F.W.O. post-doctoral researcher at the Law Faculty of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, collaborating with Prof. Esther van Zimmeren and the research group ‘Government and Law’ of the Law Faculty.

Christine’s area of expertise and research revolves around public international law and international environmental law in general and international biodi­versity and agricultural biodiversity law and governance in particular (food security and food systems, sustainable agriculture, fair and equitable sharing of the benefits deriving from the use of biodiversity, farmers’ rights, agroecological transition, intellectual property rights over biodiversity, etc.). She has published extensively on these topics, her latest book (2018) being The Commons, Plant Breeding and Agricultural Research. Challenges for Food Security and Agrobiodiversity (co-edited with Prof. Fabien Girard), Routledge.

She holds a PhD jointly conducted at the Centre for Philosophy of Law of the Universite catholique de Louvain and at the Centre for IT & IP Law at the KU Leuven, under the co-supervision of Prof. Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Prof. Olivier De Schutter and Prof. Geertrui Van Overwalle. She received a LL.M from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in Public International Law, after car­rying out university legal studies in France and the UK.

She has been a consultant for various international organizations and gov­ernments, such as the United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP), fran­cophone African Countries’ governments, Bioversity International (Italy), the International Development Law Organization (IDLO, Italy) and the Belgian Federal Ministry of Environment. She has worked as a legal research fellow with the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL), based at the McGill University in Montreal (Canada), where she specialized in the field of international environmental law, biodiversity, biosafety and agrobiodiversity international law.