About the Surrey Centre for International and Environmental Law

Areas of expertise

• Environmental law
• Environmental health law
• European Union law
• Public International Law
• Human rights law
• Migration
• Security
• Armed conflict and counter-terrorism
• International humanitarian law
• Comparative law

View our members to find out more.

About us

At the core of the Surrey Centre for International and Environmental Law (SCIEL) is research focusing on the challenges being faced across the globe.

Our mission as lawyers working within SCIEL is to focus on prevention as well as liability; procedural as well as regulatory reform and challenges and opportunities for legal reform and development. We aim to seek preventative and precautionary solutions as well as bringing our legal skills to bear on finding solutions for the future and the efficient operation of justice.

These challenges being faced across the world are many and are constantly changing. They include such areas as plastics on land and in the oceans, the air we breathe, the water we drink, climate change as well as the issues of conflict between states, migration triggered by such conflicts or by environmental degradation; and procedural justice.

The work of SCIEL is to rise to these challenges as they appear; to be adaptable and swift-thinking; to act with speed bringing the analytical and practical skills of lawyers to bear on solutions to problems and to their prevention.

Members of SCIEL bring together expertise across a range of areas including environmental law, public international law, human rights, the law of armed conflict, security, criminal justice, and migration.

The nature of these global challenges is that they interrelate and can be the trigger for conflict and turmoil causing knock-on effects in other areas covered by SCIEL.

Our mission is to bring together a range of areas of specialism which can turn and adapt to meet these challenges head-on. Our work encompasses, for example, procedural reform in international courts to improve efficiency and integrity; regulatory reform to meet the problems of plastics waste pollution; risk regulation in drinking water supplies in developing countries and legal reform to address new forms of displacement and migration.

SCIEL not only brings together lawyers expert in meeting these challenges but works with other disciplines to counter the complexity of the problems which most global challenges throw up.

We conduct research as individuals and as part of multidisciplinary teams; we run workshops, build capacity, teach, and undertake consultancy for governments, businesses and other stakeholders around these global challenges.

We aim to be adaptable and proactive in meeting these global challenges and to seek solutions through legal research which will be drivers for change and a better world.