On 25 April 2017, APLU hosted a symposium focusing on procurement law on three continents. Two scholars visiting APLU, Proff Christopher Yukins and Andrea Sundstrand, joined APLU’s Proff Geo Quinot and Sope Williams-Elegbe to discuss public procurement law in the United States, European Union, South Africa and within the Multilateral Development Banks, especially as applied in the African context. The symposium was attended by about 50 delegates including postgraduate students, academics in law, public administration and logistics, public officials, legal practitioners and members of the NGO community.
About the speakers:
Prof Christopher R. Yukins,
Lynn David Research Professor in Government Procurement Law; Co-Director of the Government Procurement Law Program, George Washington University School of Law, USA
Christopher R. Yukins has many years of experience in public procurement law. He was for several years a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, where he handled trials and appeals involving bid protests and contract claims against the U.S. government.
He teaches on government contract formations and performance issues, bid protests, Contract Disputes Act litigation, and comparative issues in public procurement, and focuses especially on emerging public policy questions in U.S. procurement.
He is an active member of the Public Contract Law Section of the American Bar Association, serves on the steering committee to the International Procurement Committee of the ABA International Law Section, and previously served as the president of the Tysons Corner Chapter of the National Contract Management Association.
He is a faculty advisor to the Public Contract Law Journal, and has contributed pieces on procurement reform, international procurement, electronic commerce and information technology to a broad range of journals, including Washington Technology, Government Contractor, Legal Times, and Federal Computer Week. He has published on procurement reform in scholarly journals, including the Public Contract Law Journal, Georgetown Journal of International Law, and Public Procurement Law Review (United Kingdom).
Together with Professor Steven Schooner, he runs a popular colloquium series on procurement reform at The George Washington University Law School. In private practice, Professor Yukins has been an associate, partner, and of counsel at leading national firms; he is currently of counsel to the firm of Arnold & Porter LLP. He is an advisor to the U.S. delegation to the working group on reform of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Model Procurement Law, and he teaches and speaks often on issues of comparative and international procurement law.
Prof Andrea Sundstrand
Associate Professor in Public Law, Faculty of Law, Stockholm University, Sweden
Andrea Sundstrand is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Stockholm University in Sweden. Her primary fields of interest are public procurement, EU-law and administrative law. She is a member of the Swedish Bar Association and has previously worked eleven years as a senior legal advisor at the Swedish surveillance authority for public procurement. She has also published a number of books on public procurement and started a Swedish public procurement network for lawyers with over 240 participants and the Procurement Law Journal, an open-access scientific law journal dealing exclusively with issues of public procurement. The overall aim of the journal is to highlight the topic of public procurement law in Academia, both at Swedish universities and at universities in the Nordic countries and in the Baltic countries.
Prof Geo Quinot
Vice Dean & Professor, Department of Public Law, Stellenbosch University
Geo Quinot is Vice Dean in the Faculty of Law and Professor of Law in the Department of Public Law at Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Founding Director of the African Procurement Law Unit (APLU) and Co-Director of the Socio- Economic Rights and Administrative Justice Research Project (SERAJ). He is currently Vice President of the Administrative Justice Association of South Africa. Quinot is also admitted as an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa. In the Stellenbosch Law Faculty, Prof Quinot mainly teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He also regularly instructs public administrators in both administrative law and public procurement regulation. His research focuses on general administrative law, including a particular focus on the regulation of state commercial activity such as public procurement. He is the author of various articles in academic journals and electronic publications, chapters in book publications and author, co-author and/or editor of five book publications which includes State Commercial Activity: A Legal Framework (2009) Juta & Co and Public Procurement Regulation in Africa (2013) Cambridge University Press (with Professor Sue Arrowsmith). Quinot is a past editor-in-chief of the journal, Stellenbosch Law Review, and a founding editor of the new open-access journal, African Public Procurement Law Journal. Quinot often participates in national and international conferences in his fields of expertise, including on public procurement regulation and legal education. In 2012 and 2013 he served on a ministerial task team in the South African National Department of Health, focusing on the reform of health procurement systems in South Africa. In 2014 he completed an extensive research project for the South African National Treasury on the establishment of the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer and subsequently assisted that Office on reform of the South African public procurement regulatory regime.
Prof Sope Williams-Elegbe
Associate Professor, Department of Mercantile Law, Stellenbosch University
Prof Sope Williams-Elegbe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mercantile Law at Stellenbosch University and specialises in public procurement law, anti-corruption law, international economic law and commercial law. She is the author of several publications in the area of corruption and public procurement, including Fighting Corruption in Public Procurement: A Comparative Analysis of Disqualification or Debarment Measures (Hart, UK, 2012). She is an editor of the Journal of African Law(Cambridge University Press) and a reviews editor for the Public Procurement Law Review (Sweet & Maxwell). Sope is also a member of the World Bank’s International Advisory Group on Procurement (IAGP) and has been involved in advising international financial institutions and government bodies on anti-corruption matters. Sope read law at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and subsequently undertook an LLM at the London School of Economics where she graduated with a distinction. She also completed a doctorate degree in public procurement law at the University of Nottingham, UK. Sope has taught law at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the universities of Stirling and Nottingham, both in the UK, and has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Lagos. Sope had her research on public procurement funded by the British Academy in 2006 and 2011. Her research has also been cited by the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Shaik v The State (2008). Her most recent publication is entitled Public Procurement and Multilateral Development Banks (Hart, UK, 2017) and is the first monograph to focus specifically on the procurement law rules of MDBs.
Procurement Forum on Harnessing Public Procurement for Socio-Economic Growth, hosted in Johannesburg by the African Development Bank and the Word Bank Group. Quinot spoke as a keynote speaker in the plenary session on 3 April on “Regulating Public Procurement for Development in Africa”. He also participated in a panel discussion on the question “How can public procurement contribute to realizing socio-economic aspirations?”.
In his keynote contribution, Quinot reflected on the mainstreaming of a developmental perspective on public procurement, and particularly the regulation of public procurement, in recent years. This trend is borne out by the patent link between public procurement and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its sustainable development goals, most clearly in SDG 17 dealing with strengthening the means of implementation and partnerships for the goals; in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of 2015, where the parties commit themselves to “establish transparent public procurement frameworks as a strategic tool to reinforce sustainable development”. It emerges from the most recent UN Forum on Business and Human Rights, where there were a number of sessions focusing specially on public procurement as a mechanism to facilitate the private sector’s role in promoting human rights, including developmental rights. It emerges from the work currently done by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on State obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the context of business activities. In response to the draft general comment of the Committee on this topic, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission called on the committee to explicitly include attention to the state-business nexus in the form of public procurement.
