Leonardo Bernard

I am a Senior Lecturer with the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong, Australia. I am an accomplished legal professional and academic with extensive experience in international and ocean law. I earned my Sarjana Hukum (LLB) from the University of Indonesia in 2005 and went on to pursue an LLM in International and Comparative Law from the National University of Singapore in 2007. I later completed my Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong in 2020.

With a strong background in law, I have held several key roles throughout my career. From 2019 to the present, I have been a Lecturer at ANCORS, where I coordinate and teach courses on international law and law of the sea, provide training to government and law enforcement officials from various countries, and supervise postgraduate students on their maritime research projects. I have also led and participated in various research projects, including the effect of historic fishing rights on boundary disputes, the legal status of islands post-South China Sea Arbitration Award, and maritime boundary delimitation.

Prior to my role at ANCORS, I worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Law at the National University of Singapore from 2010 to 2016. In this role, I led and contributed to various projects, such as the South China Sea project, Treaty Law and Practice project, International Maritime Crimes in ASEAN, and the ASEAN Integration through Law Project. I have also served as an Associate Editor at the Asia Pacific Journal of Ocean Law and Policy from 2015 to 2019, where I was responsible for curating and reviewing articles, drafting editorial notes, and editing each issue of the journal.

My expertise in law has also led me to co-author the book Promoting Compliance: The Role of Dispute Settlement and Monitoring Mechanisms in ASEAN Instruments (Cambridge University Press, 2016); as well as to co-edit the books East China Sea: How to Build Confidence and Promote Cooperation (Korea Maritime Institute, 2018) and Beyond Territorial Disputes in the South China Sea: Legal Framework for the Joint Development of Hydrocarbon Resources (Cheltenham: Edwar Elgar, 2013).