As many readers would know, the Castan Centre’s annual conference – Human Rights 2012 – is on this Friday in Melbourne.   The conference is a sellout, however you can follow the twitter feed through @castanevents (a real-time stream of the event) or @castancentre (where we’ll just tweet the highlights).  We will also start publishing videos from the conference on our YouTube channel next week.

In the meantime, after some technical hitches, we’re now putting footage of all of last year’s conference sessions  on our YouTube channel.   Below you can see the keynote speech by US Consul General in Melbourne, Mr Michael Thurston. The topic was ‘Corporate Social Responsibility and the Right to Connect (to websites, to the internet and to each other)’ and the footage includes the lively Q&A session at the end.

For the rest of our 2011 conference videos, head to our YouTube channel.

For information on all of our 2011 speakers and topics (including a number of speakers’ papers), head to www.law.monash.edu.au/castancentre/events/2011/conference-2011.html

U.S. Consul General Michael Thurston discusses the importance the U.S. Government assigns to promoting global corporate social responsibility and internet freedom, the growing interconnectedness of the two issues, and concrete efforts by the U.S. State Department and partner organizations to achieve those objectives.