The 1st annual conference of the NUL WTO Chair was held on the theme, ‘The Right to Development and Operationalization of the African Continental Free Trade Area.’ The conference was completely online and attracted 20 papers, selected from a pool of several abstracts that had been submitted. The conference was held between the 27th and the 28th of October 2022.
Prof Maarteen Smeets presented the keynote paper. Prof Smeets is an associate professor at St Petersburg State University, Russia, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics (SUIBE), China, guest professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing, China. He is also a non-resident fellow at the World Trade Institute (Bern, Switzerland), a member of the steering committee of the G-20 Trade and Investment Research Network (TIRN), and a senior advisor to the WTO Chairs in China, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Lesotho, as well as to ARTNeT (UNESCAP).
The conference, though completely online, had a huge appeal to the attendees as evidenced in the feedback that was received.