Jay L. Batongbacal, Esq
LL.B University of the Philippines College of Law
MMM Dalhousie University.
Email: jbatongb@dal.ca
JAY is a lawyer from the Philippines. While he was taking his LL.B from the University of the Philippines College of Law, he worked with the Developmental Legal Assistance Center, an NGO training indigenous peoples on their legal rights. Soon after receiving his license to practice law in 1991 he worked with the National Unification Commission, first as Head of the Secretariat of the Government Negotiating Panel for Military Rebels, and then later as Executive Director of the National Amnesty Commission. He left government service in 1996 to take a Master in Marine Management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS under the CIDA Marine Scholarship Program. He returned to the Philippines the year after to work with the Philippine Center for Marine Affairs, a think tank on marine policy, covering a wide variety of fields such as community-based coastal resource management, international maritime boundary issues, marine environmental protection, shipping, and seafaring. He returned to Dalhousie University in 2003 as one of the inaugural scholars of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation and is now writing his dissertation on the social justice implications of ocean energy resource development.