Ms. Anahit Aleksandryan

Ms. Anahit Aleksandryan was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. Upon obtaining her Master of Science degree in Biophysics in 1978, Ms. Anahit Aleksandryan was engaged as a researcher in the area of Environmental Hygiene and Industrial Toxicology. In 1985 Ms. Aleksandryan completed her PhD studies in Biology. Since 1996, Dr. Aleksandryan has been employed at the Ministry of Nature Protection of the Republic of Armenia as a Principal Specialist (1996-1998), Head of Hazardous Substances and Waste Management Department (1998-2010) and Head of Hazardous Substances and Waste Policy Division (since 2010). In 2011, Dr. Aleksandryan obtained Science Doctor in Biology degree. Her publications exceed 70, including 2 monographs. Dr. Aleksandryan is Focal Point of: UNEP Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal; UNEP Stockholm Convention on POPs;UNEP Rotterdam Convention on PIC; UNECE Convention on Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents;  SAICM (Strategic Approach to International Chemical Management); Environment and Health (WHO).

Ms. Olufunke Olubunmi Babade

Ms. Olufunke Olubunmi Babade was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. Mrs. Olufunke Olubunmi Babade; born to Chief Oluyemi Omololu and Late Mrs. Ama Omololu on 17th February, 1954 in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. She holds a B.Sc (1978) in Life Sciences from the University of Westminster (London), M.Sc (1979) in Environmental Pollution Control from Leeds University, Leeds, England. She served her fatherland as a Youth Corper and a pioneer Officer with the Environmental Planning and protection Division of the then Federal Ministry of Works and Housing in 1980 after which she got a pensionable employment as Scientific Officer I on Grade Level 09. Mrs. O.O. Babade by dint of hard work was promoted to Senior Scientific Officer Grade Level 10 in 1983 and Principal Scientific Officer Grade Level 12 in 1986.  She became an Assistant Chief Environmental Scientist GL. 13 in 1988 at the then Federal Environmental protection Agency (FEPA) and rose to the rank of a Chief Environmental Scientist GL. 14 in 1992. She joined the Directorate cadre in 1996 as an Assistant Director and served in different Departments such as: Inspectorate and Compliance Monitoring; Planning and Evaluation; Industrial Compliance; Chemicals Tracking and Hazardous Waste Management; and Pollution Control. In 2000, she was appointed a Deputy Director and the Federal Controller of Environment, Lagos Zonal Office in June 2004.  She is currently the Director Pollution Control and Environmental Health Department of the Federal Ministry of Environment. Mrs.  Babade attended many training programmes and also represented the Federal Government in various seminars/meetings/workshops both locally and internationally. She is a member of the Nigerian Environmental society (NES), Chemical Society of Nigeria and Society of Environmental Managers and Planners. Mrs. Olufunke Olubunmi Babade is happily married to HRM (Oba) Babade, Owa of Oke-Oro Ekiti and the marriage is blessed with Children.

Ms. Leela Padmini Batuwitage (Vice Chair)

Ms. Batuwitage was elected to the Compliance Committee by the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties in June 2008 for two full terms, which will end at the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties. Ms Batuwitage is an Advisor to the Ministry of Environment, Sri Lanka. She formerly was  the Additional Secretary (Environment and Policy) of the Ministry of Environment, Sri Lanka. She has been actively involved in the Basel Convention since COP2. She has extensive experience in Development of National Environmental Policies and Strategies, International Environmental Policies, International Environmental Negotiations, Industrial Ecology and Green Design, and Natural Resources Economies in Developing Countries. She represented the Asia and the Pacific Region at the Intersessional Working Group to review the 10 year Strategic Plan for the implementation of the Basel Convention. She also represented the Asia and the Pacific Region in the Ad-Hoc Joint Working Group on Cooperation and Coordination between the Basel, Rotterdam and the Stockholm Conventions. She was a Vice Chair at the 4th Meeting of the Open Ended Working Group for the Basel Convention. Her Ph.D Thesis was on “A Sustainable Production and Consumption Model for Sri Lanka, Considering the Developing Country Perspective in relation to Global Change”. She has been offered a Special Recognition Award by the National Cleaner Production Center in recognition of the invaluable contribution to Cleaner Production in Sri Lanka.

Ms. Anne Daniel

Ms. Anne Daniel was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. She is a General Counsel with the Constitutional, Administrative and International Law Section of the Department of Justice, who has provided legal advice to the Government of Canada on international environmental law over the last twenty years, including on multilateral environmental agreements in the chemicals, ocean dumping and biodiversity fields.  Her 1997 LL.M. thesis was on compliance with environmental agreements.  She has advised on the Basel Convention since the mid-1990s, was involved in the negotiation of the Liability Protocol and the compliance procedures, served on the Compliance Committee from 2004-2006, and was recently elected by the Tenth Conference of the Parties for two terms on the Committee from 2011-2015.  She is a former Co-chair of the Basel Open-ended Working Group (2004-05).  Ms. Daniel recently finished several years as Chair of the Compliance Group of the 1996 Protocol to the London Convention (ocean dumping), previously having chaired the negotiation of those compliance procedures.  She has been the chair of ongoing negotiations for compliance procedures under the Stockholm Convention and is a Vice-President of that Convention. Ms. Daniel is also currently participating in the negotiation of a global treaty on mercury.

Mr. Enrique Moret Hernández

Mr. Enrique Moret Hernández was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. He is Director of the International Affairs Department in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment of Cuba.

Mr. Shunichi Honda

Mr. Shunichi Honda is Section Chief, Office of Waste Disposal Management, Waste Management and Recycling Department, Ministry of the Environment, Japan. He is in charge of multilateral environmental agreements, in particular the Basel Convention, international affairs on waste and chemicals clusters including the negotiation of a global treaty on mercury, and international programmes on waste management. He obtained his Ph.D. in Environmental Science in 2003 from the University of Shizuoka, Japan. He studied his postdoctoral course at the Department of Environmental Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, from 2003 to 2005. During the same period, he was an assistant Professor at the Basel Convention Regional Centre for Asia and the Pacific (BCRC China). Prior to his current position, he was a researcher at the National Institute for Minamata Disease, Ministry of the Environment, Japan, from 2005 to 2008.

Mr. Mohammed Khashashneh

Mr. Mohammed Khashashneh was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. He is Director, Hazardous Substances and Waste Management Directorate in the Ministry of Environment of Jordan.

Ms. Marie-Pierre Méganck

Ms. Marie-Pierre Méganck was nominated by France on 13 March 2012  to serve on the Committee as the alternate of Ms Anne-Laure Genty until the twelfth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. Ms Meganck is born in 1961 in Paris (France). After studying french litterature and civilisation she became a civil servant in 1984. She had worked in different institutions:  ministry of public works and spatial planning (1984 -1989, and 2000-2006); ministry of transports (1990-1992 and 1997-2000); and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (1992-1997). In her different functions, she has been involved in the negociation of european regulation for transports by road (lorries and buses); organisation and infrastructures (french and european) for transport by river; european and international standardization (CEN, ISO); and formation of high level engineers (training courses, internship). Since 2007 she is working in the Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Developpment, as Head of International and European Affairs Unit, in the general directorate of risk prevention. The general directorate of risk prevention is dealing with all risks: technological, chronical, chemical, wastes, and natural : floods, earthquaters, tempest, landsliding... It is involved in international agreements (UN) on waste, chemical, and disaster risk reduction.

Mr. Dessalegne Mesfin Fanta (Vice Chair)

Mr. Dessalegne Mesfin obtained his Masters Degree in Environment for Development in 2007. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Addis Ababa University and obtained LLB. He also pursued a correspondence course in International Environmental Policy and Law. For a couple of years, he worked as Head of the Legal and Certification Service of the then called Ethiopian Authority for Standardization and served as Public Prosecutor on matters dealing with Metrology. He joined the Environmental Protection Authority of Ethiopia (EPA) as an Environmental Policy Analyst and was later appointed as Head of the Environmental Policy and Legislation Department of EPA. Currently, he is Deputy Director General of the Ethiopian Environmental Protection Authority and has written and presented numerous studies in the area of environment and development. He also participated in a number of Multilateral Environmental Agreements representing Ethiopia. Mr. Dessalegne served as co-chair of the Legal and Implementation working group of the Basel Convention that was established by COP 6 to the Basel Convention. He also served as Vice President of the Bureau of the First Conference of the Parties to the Rotterdam Convention. He served as a member of the Steering Committee for the International Expert Meeting on Sustainable Consumption and Production. In addition, he is member of the Steering Committee of the Nile Transboundary Environmental Action Programme and Chair of the Small Grant Programme of the GEF-UNDP/Ethiopia. Mr. Mesfin was elected to the Compliance Committee by the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties in June 2008 for two full terms, which will end at the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties.

Ms. Jimena Nieto (Chair)

Ms. Jimena Nieto was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. She is a lawyer with a Master of Laws (LLM) in Public Environmental Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, United Kingdom and has a Certificat d'études politiques at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. She is fluent in Spanish, English and French. In 2011 at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia, she was in charge of the preparatory process for the Basel Convention COP10 that was held in Cartagena de Indias. Ms Nieto was also the Head (Alternate) of the Colombian Delegation during COP10. In her capacity as Head of the International Affairs Office of the then, Colombian Ministry of Environment, in the period 1993 – 2003, she was part of the Colombian delegations that represented the government in different multilateral fora, including biodiversity, climate change, waste, chemicals and international environmental governance. In that capacity she attended several meetings of the then Legal and Technical Working Group of the Basel Convention as well as COP5 in Basel, Switzerland. She participated actively in the negotiation of the Liability and Redress Protocol to the Basel Convention.  It is also worth mentioning that as part of the Colombian delegation to the biosafety negotiations, she was elected in the year 2000, Co-chair of the negotiating process in the context of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, that lead in October 2010 to the adoption of the “Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol on Liability and Redress for Damage resulting from Living Modified Organisms”. In 2007 she was designated coordinator of environmental affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, until 2008 when she resigned. Currently she is a Professor of International Environmental Law, in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at three prestigious universities in Bogota.

Mrs. Irena Sedlackova

Ms. Irena Sedlácková was nominated by the Czech Republic on 1 February 2012  to serve on the Committee as the alternate of Ms. Zdenka Bubenikova until the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties. Ms Sedlácková works at the Waste Management Department of the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic. She is a National Contact Person for the Basel Convention since 2008 and participated in the ninth and tenth meetings of the Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention. She has experience in the administrative procedure for transboundary movements of wastes and she regularly takes part in border controls of the transboundary movements of waste.

Ms. Judith Torres

Ms Judith Torres was nominated by Uruguay on 20 October 2011  to serve on the Committee as the alternate of Ms Pauline Davies until the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties. Ms Torres is Head of the Department of Hazardous Substances. Division of Environmental Control and Performance, National Environmental Directorate of Uruguay. 

Mr. Roy Watkinson (Vice Chair)

Mr. Watkinson was elected to the Compliance Committee by the sixth meeting of the Conference of the Parties in December 2002 and served until the end of the eight meeting of the Conference of the Parties in November 2006. He was elected as Chair of the Compliance Committee in 2003 and presided over the Committee’s four meetings until the expiry of his term of office. He was re-elected to the Compliance Committee by the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. He is a UK expert dealing with UNEP Basel Convention, enforcement and compliance with Multilateral Environmental Agreements and hazardous waste management. As the UK Environment Agency’s Hazardous Waste Policy Manger he initiated a number of projects on controlling transboundary shipments of waste that led to successful prosecutions. He has been UK representative on OECD committees and at the European Union for controlling transboundary movements of wastes. He has contributed to international conferences, working groups and projects in respect of environmental crime prevention, waste regulation and management and ship dismantling – chairing the Basel Convention’s working groups on this issue and the Joint ILO/IMO/BC working group. Mr. Watkinson was elected to the Compliance Committee by the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties in June 2008 for two full terms, which will end at the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties.

Mr. Raphael Dakouri Zadi

Mr Raphael Dakouri Zadi was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. He is the Point Focal for the Basel Convention, Stockholm Convention and SAICM  in the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of Cote d'Ivoire.

Mr. Felix Zaharia (Rapporteur)

Mr. Felix Zaharia was elected to the Committee by the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties. He is the Deputy Director for International Law and Treaties in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania. While dealing with all issue concerning international law, his main area o expertise is international environmental law. He has dealt with international environmental law extensively, and represented Romania in all issues concerning international environmental law, before other implementation and compliance committees. He has also participated, on behalf of Romania, in proceedings before the International Court of Justice. 

Mr. Adel Shafei Osman

Mr. Adel Shafei Osman, was elected to the committee by the eleventh Conference of Parties, Adel has Egyptian nationality, graduated in 1983 from Cairo University as a chemical engineer. In 1995 he finalised his post-graduate studies in environmental engineering at Achen Technical University (Germany). Adel has a wide scope of experiences in chemicals and waste management gained through 20 years in touch with governmental, public enterprises, private sector, universities, and research institutions in and outside Egypt. He is carrying over the tradition of introducing unprecedented contribution to the Egyptian environmental scene in a number of activities as environment and trade, policy indicators, toxic release inventories, and environmental security.

Currently he is carrying over the post of General Director in charge for the Chemicals and waste cluster, managing the national focal point for Basel convention since 2001, he is involved in many negotiation forums relevant to chemicals and waste cluster including Mercury treaty, and he is a member of the executive board of the quick start programm of SAICM.