During the ICA Global Cooperative Conference in September, Cooperative lawyers, academics and movement leaders met to discuss how to respond to emerging challenges and contribute to lasting peace across the globe. Two days of debate and discussion were hosted by the ICA’s Global Office and the IX Continental Congress on Cooperative Law to convene their Second International Symposium.
Last year’s inaugural Symposium on Co-operative Law was held at the Peace Palace in The Hague on United Nations Day, during the International Year of Cooperatives. Conceived as a recurring international forum, it seeks to offer a space for lawyers, scholars and global movement leaders to examine how much law can preserve co-operative identity while responding to economic, technological and societal change.
In line with the broader ICA Conference theme – Building Bridges: Cooperative Contributions for a Peaceful World – this year’s Symposium focused on the relationship between co-operative law and peaceful societies. Discussions were linked to international human rights principles and the UN Declaration on the Right to Peace, formally adopted in 2016 as a means of promoting human rights and encouraging international peace via tolerance, debate and co-operation between countries.
Symposium Coordinator was Santosh Kumar, Director of Legislation at the ICA. “The issue is not merely whether co-operatives support peace as an aspiration,” he said. “The more demanding question is whether the co-operative way of organising economic relationships, ie, participation rather than domination, mutuality rather than extraction, and responsibility alongside rights, can itself contribute to the institutional foundations of peaceful societies.
“Co-operative law structures relationships between people. It determines who participates, how decisions are taken, how economic power is exercised, how capital relates to control and how an enterprise understands its responsibilities towards other co-operatives and the community around it.
“Questions of co-operative governance are also questions about the organisation of economic power. Institutions which are organised around democratic participation, solidarity, autonomy and mutual responsibility invite consideration of whether the organisation of economic life itself can contribute to the conditions in which peaceful societies endure.”
The Symposium explored the unique relationship between co-operative law and peace in a dialogue between Professor Dante Cracogna, chair of the regional Commission on Cooperative Law, and Professor Hagen Henrÿ, chair of the ICA Cooperative Law Committee. It invited participants to look beyond conventional boundaries of enterprise law and consider how co-operative law can contribute to more peaceful societies.
Professor Henrÿ also gave the Symposium’s keynote address on the theme of ‘Co-operative Law: Bridge Over Troubled Water’.
Another significant development was the launch of amicus.coop, a new digital legal and policy platform designed to connect co-operative legislation, jurisprudence, research and legal expertise worldwide. It will aim to support ongoing collaboration between conferences and strengthen the global co-operative legal community, providing an enduring infrastructure through which knowledge can be shared and built beyond the conference hall.
Other key items on the agenda included digitalisation, taxation, regional integration and member participation. The Symposium also brought a younger generation of lawyers into the mix, with Dulce Bustamante examining whether legal innovation can progress inter-generational communication of the co-operative idea and why co-operative law matters to young people.
The role of technology and online participation, where meetings, voting, information and even economic exchange take place digitally, was also explored.
Osamu Nakano of the Japan Workers’ Co-operative Union brought perspectives from the Japanese worker co-operative experience. Merav Niv of the Kibbutz Movement spoke about the evolution of one of the world’s most distinctive traditions of collective organisation, illustrating how co-operative institutions emerge from particular histories and societies, yet confront questions that transcend national borders.
Professor Carlos Vargas and Professor Marina Aguilar Rubio also contributed ideas on innovation, integration and taxation in co-operative law, within the broader question of how law recognises and protects the co-operative difference.
And Dr Morshed Mannan of the University of Edinburgh contributed reflections on technology and co-operative law, including the implications of technological change for membership, governance and participation.
Contributions from Moshi Co-operative University in Tanzania brought an African perspective, including reflections on regional approaches to co-operative legislation and the development of a model co-operative legal framework. This introduced the topic of regionalisation – seen as another increasingly important dimension of co-operative law.
As Kumar is keen to stress, another important bridge between the regional and international discussions is the renewed ICA Legal Framework Analysis (LFA), supported through the ICA–EU partnership.
Representatives of the ICA Regional Offices presented updates on the vision and timelines of research in their respective regions, which was said to be invaluable in helping those attending understand how effectively co-operative principles are translated into law, where legislation enables co-operative development, and where legal frameworks may inadvertently constrain it.
The discussions on co-operative law did not remain confined to the Congress and Symposium and carried their principal reflections and takeaways into the wider ICA Global Conference during its declaration session.
María Eugenia Pérez Zea of Colombia, a returning member of the ICA board representing Coomeva and president of the Colombian association of co-operative lawyers, delivered a valedictory address, connecting the Americas’ long tradition of co-operative legal scholarship and the emerging international agenda.
Kumar, who moderated sessions with Nicolas Jaquet of the Regional Commission on Cooperative Law, said that regional research will now help contribute towards the development of a major global report on co-operative law.
He said: “This could provide an important comparative foundation for the international co-operative movement. It would allow developments across different jurisdictions to be examined systematically, identify emerging areas of legal innovation, and illuminate the recurring challenges faced by lawmakers seeking to protect co-operative identity while enabling co-operatives to respond to changing economies and societies.”
And as the Congress gets to work on its findings, he concludes: “The Legal Framework Analysis can deepen the comparative evidence base; the Symposium and Continental Congress can provide spaces for interrogation and debate; and a platform such as amicus.coop can help ensure that legal knowledge does not remain confined to reports or conference proceedings, but becomes accessible to and capable of being enriched by the co-operative movement itself.
“The bridges built in Panama were not simply between conferences or institutions. They were bridges between bodies of knowledge, generations of lawyers, regions of the co-operative movement, and different ways of thinking about the purposes of law itself – and the bridges we can build between the organisation of economic life and the pursuit of peace.”
