Honour of Secretary General Honoris Causa – John Hare
John Hare served the CMI in two major respects. Firstly, he served as an Executive Councillor for 8 years between 1999 and 2007. Sadly, his effectiveness in the last year or two of those terms was seriously impacted by the ill health of his wife. However, this did not prevent him and his wife from welcoming the CMI to the Cape Town Colloquium in their home city in 2006. As an Executive Councillor, Hare had been an advocate for change, particularly in reducing the terms of office of Executive Councillors from 4 years to 3 years. He did not have the support of the then Executive Council in doing so, but it was one of the priority recommendations made by the Steering Committee in 2008. He was an incisive contributor to meetings of the Executive Council, bringing to bear both his acumen and experience from private practice, as well as his academic brilliance. During this period, he also chaired the first IWG on Marine Insurance that the CMI had formed.
John Hare’s second role, in which he gave so much to the CMI, was as Secretary General, which he took over upon the retirement of Nigel Frawley in 2013 at the Dublin Colloquium. He then served until the Symposium in Genoa in 2017, organizing in between the Hamburg/Berlin Conference in 2015, the Istanbul Colloquium in 2015, and the New York Conference in 2016, until his retirement in Genoa in 2017.
As anyone who attended those meetings will attest, they were magnificently organized both from an intellectual and social perspective. The most challenging was, of course, the New York Conference, during which he also managed to incorporate the MLAUS Spring Meeting within the bounds of the CMI Conference. That conference, of course, was where the York Antwerp Rules were revised. Like the Beijing Conference in 2012, it featured many concurrent sessions, but it was the knitting together of the MLAUS Spring Meeting and a CMI Conference that was the tour de force.
During his tenure as Secretary-General, John also encouraged the formation of many new international working groups consistent with developments in the maritime legal world, focusing on matters such as cybercrime, refugees (which he was passionate about), MASS, and others.
Since his retirement, John has continued to organize and make significant contributions to the awarding of the CMI Prize, which is an aspect of CMI’s work in furthering education, something that John Hare contributed to greatly in his professional life.
For those who have only attended CMI meetings in recent years, they may not know that it was John Hare who inaugurated the handing over of the flag at the dinner or assembly meeting concluding CMI meetings. He famously described it on one of the earlier occasions as the “traditional handing over of the flag.”
Upon being conferred this title, John Hare had this to say;
All I can say is that my four years as Secretary-General was the very best way to wind down a long career in maritime law and academia. It was such a privilege to have worked with so many of the world’s top maritime lawyers. And the administration of the Comité is a very supportive family of like-minded colleagues.
During my term I had the privilege of driving the CMI’s conferences in Hamburg, Istanbul, New York and finally Genoa. The camaraderie I enjoyed with the organising committees of those countries remains one of my fondest memories. We worked hard, but we had such fun! I absolutely loved it all.
I am keeping ‘within the family’ in my retirement by continuing to convene and moderate the yCMI Essay Competition – an initiative we started during my time as EXCO member in the 1990s. It is a most stimulating and rewarding task.
And I thank the CMI for this generous recognition.’