Hayley Jones appointed Director of McCabe Centre

Monday 20 September, 2021


The McCabe Centre for Law & Cancer is proud to announce the appointment of Hayley Jones as the centre’s Director after two successful years as Acting Director.

Hayley has been leading the McCabe Centre since August 2019 and has guided it through significant challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. She has built strong, enduring relationships with the McCabe Centre’s local and global partners and helped continue its impact on legal measures to prevent and control cancer around the world.

Under Hayley’s leadership, the McCabe Centre shifted its international legal training program online, allowing it to continue delivering world-renowned training despite pandemic travel restrictions. The move online was part of a wider digital shift that expanded the McCabe Centre’s reach and improved engagement with its alumni network of 270+ lawyers and policymakers in 77 different countries.

Moving forward, Hayley wants the McCabe Centre to build on its reputation as a trusted advisor to alumni and civil society partners, who she says are the key to the McCabe Centre’s impact on the ground.

“With the world still battling a pandemic, and health inequities getting more extreme every day, there has never been a more important time for the McCabe Centre to empower leaders across sectors and across borders to use law to improve public health and reduce the cancer burden,” Hayley said.

Hayley took on the role of Acting Director in 2019 after founding director Jonathan Liberman was appointed Associate Professor in Law and Global Health at the University of Melbourne.  She brings a wealth of experience as a dual-qualified lawyer (Australia and England) with a focus on access to justice and human rights initiatives at the grass-roots and global level. In her previous role as Pro Bono Manager at a global law firm based in London, Hayley managed pro bono referrals and relationships across 31 countries and drove innovations including health-justice partnerships and developing end-to-end casework models for corporate and community lawyers preparing citizenship applications for undocumented children.

Hayley will continue to be supported in her work by the McCabe Centre’s small but dedicated team of public health lawyers and experts based in Australia, The Philippines, Fiji, Kenya and New Zealand, as well as by the McCabe Centre’s Joint Oversight Committee and the wider, multi-disciplinary teams at Cancer Council and the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). The McCabe Centre is a joint initiative of Cancer Council Victoria, UICC and Cancer Council Australia. It launched on World Cancer Day 2012 and will celebrate its 10th anniversary on 4 February 2022.

In its first decade, the McCabe Centre has contributed to significant legal reforms to prevent cancer and protect people affected by it.  In Australia, the McCabe Centre published extensive research on Making the law work better for people with cancer and contributed to reform of the Victorian Health Complaints framework. Internationally, the McCabe Centre has trained and supported lawyers and policymakers who went on to pass public health laws in at least 22 countries, and successfully defended laws from legal challenges in at least seven countries. It also worked with 17 of the 20 countries to help develop tobacco plain packaging laws to date.

The McCabe Centre was designated as the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Law & Noncommunicable Disease in 2018, and the Knowledge Hub for legal challenges to implementation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

These achievements and others will be detailed in the McCabe Centre’s upcoming 10-year Impact Report.

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