Dr. Christine Frison is a post-doctoral research at the FWO (Law Faculty of the University of Antwerp) and FNRS (Center for Philosophy of Law, Université catholique de Louvain), Belgium. She holds a Ph.D. jointly conducted at the Center for Philosophy of Law of the Université catholique de Louvain and at the Center for IT & IP Law at the KU Leuven, under the co-supervision of Prof. Tom Dedeurwaerderer, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, and Prof. Geertrui Van Overwalle. In her PhD, she critically analyzed the multilateral access and benefit-sharing mechanism of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic resources for Food and Agriculture through the lens of the Theory of the Commons.
Her area of expertise and research evolves around international environmental law in general and international biodiversity and agricultural biodiversity law and governance in particular (access to genetic resources, food security, sustainable agriculture, fair and equitable sharing of the benefits deriving from the use of biodiversity, farmers’ rights, biosafety, etc.). Between 2004 and 2011, she has been a consultant for various international organizations and governments such as the United Nation Environment Program (UNEP), 15 francophone African Countries' governments, Bioversity International (Italy), the International Development Law Organization (IDLO, Italy) and the Belgian Federal Ministry of Environment. She was part of the Belgian ‘Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS) Contact Group’ from 2006 to 2011.
She also holds a LL.M from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in Public International Law, after carrying out university legal studies in France and the UK. She has worked as a Legal Research Fellow with the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL), based at the McGill University in Montréal (Canada) where she specialized in the field of international environmental law, biodiversity, biosafety and agrobiodiversity international law. Besides numerous consultancy reports, Dr. Frison published scientific papers in internationally recognizes journals as well as several books with Routledge and Cambridge University Press.