Aotearoa NZ Peace & Conflict Studies Trust: Trustees

Chris Barfoot

Chris Barfoot is a retired real estate agent. His career has been in the family firm of Barfoot and Thompson where he started as a salesman and later became a branch manager and director of the company. He is married to Pat and they have three grown-up children and five grandchildren. He has history degrees from the University of New Zealand and the University of Oxford.

Though his father was in the British Army at the Third Battle of Ypres where 250,000 soldiers died, Chris became a pacifist out of Christian conviction in his early thirties and has worked since then to ensure that similar tragedies never happen again.

He is active in his Anglican parish church where he has taught Sunday School for many years. In the local community he teaches Bible-in-Schools and has helped to establish the Tahuna Torea Nature Reserve on the Tamaki Estuary.

Since his retirement he has written a history of the family firm and another on Tahuna Torea as well as a series of Biblical and historical studies entitled Christ and War.

As one of the trustees he sees the National Peace Centre at Otago University as a place where the best minds in the country and from overseas will study the root causes of war and seek to develop practical non-violent solutions.

Margaret Bedggood

Margaret Bedggood, QSO, is an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Waikato, where she was a Professor of Law from 1994 to 2003 and Dean of the Law School from 1994 to 1999. For five years (1989-1994) she was the Chief Commissioner of the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, during the passage of the Human Rights Act 1993. She has been a member of Amnesty International since 1968, was previously Chair of the New Zealand section and was a member of its governing body, the nine person International Executive Committee, from 1999 to 2005.

She has taught in a variety of institutions and jurisdictions and has published in tort, employment law and human rights. She is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford, and has been a member of the Faculty of a Summer School Programme and a Masters Programme, of the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford on International Human Rights Law, and of a Summer School Programme in Theology.

She has been a member of the Refugee Council, of the Peace Foundation Council and has a long-standing interest in social justice issues within the Anglican Church as a member of the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis and is currently chair of the New Zealand branch of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.

She is the Chairperson of the Management Committee of the Human Rights Foundation of Aotearoa New Zealand, a broad based human rights NGO launched in December 2001.
(See www.humanrights.co.nz)

Treasa Dunworth (Co Chair)

Treasa Dunworth Treasa is a graduate of Auckland and Harvard Law Schools. She is now Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland, where she teaches and researches in the area of international law. Her main research areas are the relationship between international law and domestic law, issues around disarmament and arms control, and the accountability of international organisations

Treasa lives in Titirangi with her husband Marty, and son Steven. She served on Green Bay School's Board of Trustees for many years and has been Chair of the Titirangi Festival of Music Trust since its inception in 2004.

Treasa joins the Trust as Co Chair in conjunction with Maui Solomon.

Marjory Lewis

Marjory Lewis Marjory was appointed Secretary of the Trust following its inception. Since then she has been responsible for developing and maintaining the Trust database and handling much of the day-to-day correspondence received by the Trust

Marjory is a Registered Nurse

Maui Solomon (Co-Chair)

(Moriori, Kai Tahu and Pakeha [English, Irish, French and German]).

Maui Solomon Maui is a Barrister and Indigenous Rights Advocate with 24 years legal experience specialising in land and fishing claims, cultural and intellectual property, environmental law and Treaty/Indigenous Peoples rights issues and civil litigation.

He is a key legal and political advocate for the recognition of the identity and rights of his own Moriori people of Rekohu (Chatham Islands) and also Maori tribes in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In addition to being Co-Chair of Trust, Maui is also Vice-Chair of Hokotehi Moriori Trust Board and Chairman of their commercial arm, Kopi Holdings Limited.

Since 1994 Maui has represented three of the six tribes in the landmark Wai 262 claim before the Waitangi Tribunal concerning indigenous flora and fauna and cultural/ intellectual heritage rights of Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi, which claim seeks, among other things, to develop a unique system for protection and use of Maori traditional knowledge and associated resources.

Maui maintains an active interest in international Indigenous Peoples issues with particular emphasis on the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. He is currently the President of the International Society of Ethnobiology, a society dedicated to working in harmony and collaboration with indigenous and traditional peoples which seeks better recognition and protection of their resources and cultural and intellectual property rights. He has written and published many papers in the fields of his work and is regularly invited to attend and address international conferences.

Maui and his partner Susan live in Titahi Bay, Porirua, Aotearoa/NZ and have five teenage children.

Me rongo (in peace).

Peter Wills

Associate Professor Peter Wills is a theoretical biologist in the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland. He has previously held appointments in Australia, Germany and the United States. He has been outspoken on many public interest issues and recently served as Chairperson of Greenpeace NZ.

Peter's research interests span physics, biology and medicine, including biochemical thermodynamics, prion disease and molecular evolution, and recently the evolutionary origin of genetic coding and information transfer in molecular biology.

Peace may sound simple – one beautiful word – but it requires everything we have,
every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.