“It’s surprising how often successful multilateral negotiations at the UN come down to individual personalities and relationships,” says Anne Daniel LLB ’81.
“Representing Canada at the UN to promote Canadian and global environmental interests has been a highlight of my career,” observes Daniel, who retired last fall as a general counsel with the Constitutional, Administrative and International Law Section of the federal Department of Justice after 35 years of service.
For 25 of those years, she practised international environmental law, initially participating on and later leading Canadian delegations, and chairing numerous United Nations meetings and negotiating groups that involved multilateral agreements focusing on chemicals, hazardous wastes, ocean dumping, biodiversity, genetically modified organisms, and genetic resources.
The international stage is a long way from Tecumseh, Ont, where Daniel grew up, just east of Windsor.
She enrolled in the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Social Sciences—winning the Faculty Gold Medal for 1976-77. “I knew I wanted to get into law school. So I took subjects that interested me— social science, ancient history, biology—and focused on getting good marks.”
Earning a law degree interested her because of her passion for social change. “It was the reason I went into law and to Windsor Law,” she says, though she was also accepted after two years of undergrad at the University of Toronto, and the University of Ottawa.
Daniel always knew that she wanted to be involved with social policy issues, and chose Windsor Law believing it to be a law school more reflective of her social values. “I had the marks and LSAT score to go elsewhere, but I wanted a law school with a more personalized admissions process. And, most importantly, the University of Windsor courses, programs and professors were more socially oriented.”
Daniel took a summer job at Legal Assistance of Windsor (LAW), which celebrated its 40th anniversary in October 2014, and another job at the Faculty’s Community Law Program, helping to produce videos and other educational materials on sexual harassment and labour law.
She was a member of the Student Legal Aid’s Law and the Deaf Program, learning American Sign Language and representing deaf clients’ interests in court and at city hall.
All of this convinced her that she wanted a legal career that focused on public policy.
Daniel articled with the federal Department of Justice. “What better place to be than the place that makes law?” she asks. She felt her legal education had prepared her well. “I had done litigation at LAW after my first year. Only 20 years old, going to criminal and family court, was an intense learning experience.
“That experience was directly useful when I articled at Justice, because I spent time in the criminal prosecutions section, responsible for minor drug and other federal offences.”
In the late 1980s at Justice, Daniel helped implement the Japanese-Canadian Redress Agreement regarding their treatment by the federal government during and after World War II.
She also advised on amendments to the Citizenship Act in response to the 1986 Deschênes Commission Inquiry report on war criminals.
In 1989, when an opportunity arose for Daniel to become part of the in-house Justice team advising Environment Canada, she quickly seized it, becoming involved environmental legal policy issues and international environmental law.
In 1992, while on education leave after the birth of her second child, Daniel began a master’s degree, focusing on international environmental law.
She practised international environmental law for 25 years, advising mainly Environment and Climate Change Canada on a wide range of multilateral environmental agreements. In the ten years before she retired, Daniel served as a general counsel with the Constitutional, Administrative and International Law Section of the federal Department of Justice.
The accomplished alumna represented Canada at UN negotiations involving agreements that focused on chemicals, hazardous wastes, ocean dumping, biodiversity, genetically modified organisms, and genetic resources. Before a new treaty was ratified, she would also provide advice to the government departments charged with implementing it on proposed legislative and regulatory changes necessary to comply with its provisions.
She became an internationally recognized expert in compliance with environmental treaties, and participated in and chaired negotiations for compliance mechanisms, as well as serving on them once established.
Her expertise in compliance found its roots in the thesis she wrote for her master’s degree, which focused on the issue of environmental treaty compliance.
“At the time I was doing my research for it, there was so little out there.”
Only one such compliance mechanism existed at the time, under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, she explains. “I had to draw lessons from human rights and arms control treaties. So, while it was difficult to write in that context, in retrospect it is amusing because my thesis ended up being a really good base for me right until the end of my career.”
Environmental law treaties are “living” treaties, she explains. “They need to evolve as we learn more about the environment and how to monitor the effects of human activity on it.”
One environmental treaty she was involved with, in particular, is an excellent example of how a treaty evolves: the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
The Stockholm Convention, negotiated between 1998-2000, aims to eliminate or restrict the production, use, import and export of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), toxic chemicals that are persistent in the environment, bioaccumulate up the food chain, and travel long distances. It entered into force in 2004 and now has 182 Parties worldwide.
“From 2004 onward, we had annual and then biennial meetings to keep an eye on different issues as they arose. Things like, do we need to add new chemicals to the treaty to be regulated? How do we shape new mechanisms on compliance and effectiveness evaluation?
During the negotiation of the convention, Daniel and a colleague added an article that required the effectiveness of the Convention to be evaluated over time. Years later she was elected to serve as the chair of the first Effectiveness Evaluation Committee of the Stockholm Convention.
“Chemicals move north on air currents and go to the Arctic and settle into the environment. Our Aboriginal people live off the land and, when their environment is impacted, so are their lives. Therefore, we wanted to periodically review and measure if this treaty was working and, if not, what needed to be fixed.”
For their efforts in negotiating the Stockholm Convention, Daniel and the rest of the negotiating team received Certificates of Appreciation from the Prime Minister of Canada in 2001. In the absence of the Prime Minister at the award ceremony, Herb Gray, the Deputy Prime Minister and MP for Windsor West for many years, handed out the awards, and Daniel was delighted to tell him of her roots in Essex County.
Daniel considers her involvement in this treaty—in the treaty negotiations, chairing compliance negotiations and the first Effectiveness Evaluation Committee--as “probably one of the most important things I’ve done in my career.”
Another highlight was her involvement in the negotiation of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, a global treaty designed to protect human health and the environment from anthropogenic emissions and releases of mercury and mercury compounds-- another treaty of importance to protect Canada’s Arctic and indigenous peoples from foreign sources of mercury that travel to the Arctic.
During its negotiation, Daniel co-chaired negotiating groups on a number of articles of the treaty, and co-headed the Canadian delegation at the final round of negotiations. It was adopted in 2013, and Canada was one of the first 50 countries to ratify and help bring the treaty into force in August 2017. And yes, Daniel also helped leverage a provision on effectiveness evaluation into the Convention on behalf of Canada.
“Achieving successful outcomes in multilateral negotiations can be challenging because of the diversity of countries’ interests, socio-economic and technical capacity, cultures, languages, and approach to gender, all of which need to be harnessed and accommodated to resolve a particular environmental problem,” Daniel notes. “What is astonishing is that we reach agreement as often as we do.”
Daniel says it was a privilege to represent Canada at the UN and work with so many talented colleagues over the years. “When I started law school, I never dreamed that I would not only represent Canada, but that I’d get the opportunity to help shape international environmental law.
Teaching is another passion. Daniel lectured at the University of Windsor in fall 2015 for a weeklong, full credit intensive course on multilateral environmental agreements. “ It was a real pleasure to go back to the University of Windsor Law School and share my experiences ,” she says.
Daniel has trained up-and-coming negotiators with Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada and has provided training on behalf of the UN to delegates from around the world on how to chair UN chemicals and waste negotiations.
She has published numerous papers on such subjects as compliance, liability, ocean dumping, chemicals, hazardous wastes and genetic resources.
Daniel has won a Deputy Minister of Justice Award for her work in the international field. Her volunteer work for Big Sisters at the local and national level was recognized by a Department of Justice Humanitarian Award, an Ottawa Business Women’s Award and a Canada 125 medal.
Most recently, she received the 2017 Canadian Council on International Law Public Sector Lawyer Award for her distinguished career in the federal public service and her important contribution to international environmental law.
Her international law career behind her, Daniels plans to pursue her passion for teaching, research and being outside enjoying the fresh air by biking, hiking and skiing.
Nature and the environment are never far from her mind.
“Contributing to the development of international environmental law has been a real privilege. And the University of Windsor was the start of this amazing journey.”
What advice would she give a law student today?
“Don’t over plan your career path,” she says. “When I was first at Justice, I hadn’t thought about the environment as my field and was thinking more in the direction of criminal law policy. Once I got involved with international environmental law, I found that working in that field was a way to deal with social issues at the global level. Be open-minded. You just never know.”
Photo credit IISD RS/ENB
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