Honour of Secretary General Honoris Causa – Nigel Frawley
Nigel Frawley had been President of the Canadian MLA, regular attender at CMI meetings and had served on the Nominating Committee of CMI before taking on the role as Secretary-General of the CMI for 10 years from the Vancouver Conference in 2004 to the Dublin Colloquium in 2013. A lengthy tribute appears to him in the 2019 CMI Yearbook. It is hard to imagine that any previous Secretary-General of the CMI has made as significant a contribution as Nigel Frawley made to this organisation. He served under four presidents: Patrick Griggs, Jean-Serge Rohart, Karl Gombrii and Stuart Hetherington. During that period he was, together with the relevant President, responsible for all the events which took place. As Stuart Hetherington said on his retirement he made each of those Presidents “look good”. The most channelling such meeting was the Beijing Conference because of the size of the programme he put together. Sometimes 4 sessions were running contemporaneously, so many and diverse were the topics he identified to be discussed.
All those Presidents that he served under extolled his virtues at the time of his retirement. In addition friends he had made and served with regaled his attributes. They included Giorgio Berlingieri who aptly described him thus: “Nigel was extraordinary and impressed me for his greatness in so many aspects; his competence, his distinction, his polite ways, his elegance, his sense of humour and the quiet ways he faced and solved CMI activities”. His successor, John Hare, said of Nigel that he was “the master of the equitable resolution of dispute and arguments who guided, encouraged and taught me how to perform the role from a distance”. He was a details man par excellence, and took his responsibilities as Secretary General seriously and carried them out with humour and efficiency.
Nigel was also very active in encouraging international working groups and standing committees in their work but also setting up important international working groups that are still providing service to the maritime legal committee today, such as the Arctic and Antarctic IWG which he formed and chaired in its early years. He also wrote eloquently about the CMI and in particular its relationships with other international organisations such as the IMO in his “Brief History of the CMI”.
Nigel also played a significant role in the reform of many aspects of CMI affairs in serving on the 3 man Steering Committee set up by President Rohart which achieved so much.
As Stuart Hetherington said in his tribute to Nigel Frawley in the CMI Yearbook 2019 he “left an indelible mark” on the CMI.