NOUMEA (Oceania Flash) — French research institute IRD’s Noumea branch will host a three-day conference next week on the theme “Multicultural States and the Right to be Different,” the daily newspaper Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes reports.
It will feature top political science, legal specialists and scholars, from New Caledonia, metropolitan France, Vietnam, Senegal, Egypt, Algeria, Canada, Australia, French overseas Mayotte which is in the Indian Ocean and French Polynesia. They will make presentations on the various meanings of difference in politics, law.
Dr. Brij Lal, an Indo-Fijian from Australia’s National University in Canberra and Steve Ratuva, from the Fiji-based University of the South Pacific, will also deliver a paper on how they see Fiji’s multicultural society concept has evolved in the several constitutions in force since the archipelago’s independence in 1970.
French Polynesia’s Culture Minister Louise Peltzer will brief the meeting on how she perceives the multicultural situation in her French Pacific territory, while Vanuatu’s Chief Justice Vincent Lunabek will explain how cultural difference are being recognized in the Vanuatu Constitution.
A whole section of the meeting will also be devoted to the specific situation of New Caledonia with such participants as France’s High Commissioner Thierry Lataste, local government’s vice president and Kanak woman leader Dewe Gorodey, local Congress speaker, French senator and Kanak leader Simon Loueckhote, as well as University of New Caledonia’s top scholars.
