Focus: Human Rights
Rema Rajeshwari
Rema Rajeshwari is an Indian Police Service Officer with a distinguished career of integrity and passion. She has held various responsible and dynamic positions for nearly a decade. She started her career in the Police service as an Assault Commander with the 'Greyhounds', an elite special force, which undertakes high risk operations through jungle warfare against left-wing extremists. Working for people who are at the fault lines of the lethal intersection of society and violence, she has been instrumental in running successful operations against extremists, a women- and child-trafficking nexus, and other criminal activities. Rema has won accolades as the first female Indian Police Service officer from Munnar, Kerala State…
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Adamu Musa
Adamu Musa is Founder and Managing Director of AM Communications, an international consultancy in strategic and crisis communications, governance, and investment guidance in public policy and management. He is a well-known media and communications figure in Cameroon, where for more than 25 years he anchored the national prime time news broadcast by the Cameroon Radio Television Corporation (CRTV) and created and anchored two high-profile investigative news magazine programs, X-TRA MILE and CRTV CLUB. He also carried out authoritative investigations on corruption, human rights abuses, governance lapses and other societal ills. Adamu also anchored a popular CRTV flagship weekly radio program, CAMEROON CALLING. He managed a news service of both English…
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Maria "Masha" Lisitsyna
Maria "Masha" Lisitsyna is a Senior Managing Legal Officer for Criminal Justice at the Open Society Justice Initiative. She focuses on criminal justice reforms as well as litigation and advocacy on improving protection from torture in Eurasia, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia. Previously, Maria was a researcher for Human Rights Watch, working on civil and political rights in Turkmenistan and the rights of migrant workers in Russia and Kazakhstan. She is the founder and former president of the Youth Human Rights Group, a prominent Kyrgyz NGO specializing in human rights monitoring and education. In 2005, she served as a member of Kyrgyzstan’s Constitutional Council, the body convened to…
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Michael Kalisa
Michael Kalisa is a Rwandan lawyer and transitional justice expert. Over the last twenty years, Michael has worked to restore the rule of law in post-conflict countries across sub-Saharan Africa. Repatriating immediately after the Tutsi Genocide of 1994, Michael worked as a Special Assistant to the Prosecutor General of Rwanda, contributing to the rebuilding of criminal legal infrastructure and developing mechanisms to protect the rights of all citizens, including genocide victims and perpetrators. At the international level, Michael served five years on the prosecutorial team of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He is currently working as a Legal Specialist with the American Bar Association- Rule of Law…
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Kanbar Hossein-Bor
Kanbar Hossein-Bor is a senior British diplomat and international lawyer currently serving as Deputy High Commissioner for the UK in Bangladesh. He has held a number of posts, both as a lawyer and diplomat, including in the Netherlands as the head of international law team and UK agent to International Court of Justice, Iraq as the head of the human rights team, Libya, and Liberia, where he was briefly deployed as Head of Mission during the Ebola crisis. Kanbar has successfully led UK delegations in multilateral conferences and meetings, including in Vienna, Geneva, Kampala, and New York. He has also led and facilitated working groups in the International Criminal Court…
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Arshi Saleem Hashmi
Arshi Saleem Hashmi specializes in religious violent conflicts, counter-violent extremism and conflict resolution with special focus on South Asia. She is currently Dean of Faculty of Contemporary Studies and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the National Defence University, Islamabad. Arshi has been an Academic Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. She has also been a South Asia Leadership Fellow for Counter Terrorism Studies at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Rotary International Peace Fellow. She was Kodikara Fellow at RCSS that resulted in a book titled Conflict Transformation from Ethnic Movement to Terrorist Movement. Arshi is a member…
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Ana Paula Hernández
As Program Officer for Latin America at the Fund for Global Human Rights, Ana Paula worked on a portfolio that provides strategic support and funding to over 55 human rights organizations in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. She also promoted a broader initiative across Mesoamerica to defend land and resource rights and increase corporate accountability, particularly in the extractive industries. As a leading human rights advocate in Mexico, Ana Paula supported drug policy reform aimed at more balanced approach, emphasizing prevention, treatment, and human rights rather than enforcement and criminalization. She was the deputy director of the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center in the state of Guerrero, located in a mostly indigenous…
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Mustafa Haid
Mustafa Haid is a founding board member of Dawlaty Foundation, a Syrian nonprofit foundation that works with nonviolent activists on capacity-building toward democratic transition and transitional justice in Syria. A Syrian human rights advocate since 2000, Mustafa was under travel bans imposed by the Syrian regime from 2007 until 2011. Mustafa worked as a consultant for Human Rights Watch and for the UN office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) from 2011 to 2012. He has written and edited numerous articles and published research and books on issues related to transitional justice, the Syrian uprising and human…
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Ilir Dugolli
Ilir Dugolli currently serves as the Ambassador of the Republic of Kosovo to the United States of America. Following Kosovo’s independence, he was among the first group of diplomats tasked with establishing the country’s diplomatic missions. He previously served as Ambassador to TĂĽrkiye, with concurrent accreditations to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Jordan. He also held the position of Ambassador to Sweden, with accreditations to Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Prior to that, he served as Ambassador in Brussels, where he managed relations with Belgium, Luxembourg, NATO, and the European Union. Before joining the diplomatic service, he was affiliated with the Faculty of Law at the University of Prishtina and…
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Sylvia Aguilera GarcĂa
Sylvia Aguilera GarcĂa has more than two decades of experience working in human rights and peace-building in Mexico. During the past 14 years she has focused her work on developing new ways to approach public conflicts in Mexico, mainly those related to land and natural resource management, as well as those associated with the advancement of human rights, the justice system and victims’ rights. Part of her work has been focused on strengthening civil society coalitions and in developing collaborative and negotiation capabilities. During the last several years she has been working with the national Movement of Relatives of Disappeared Persons in Mexico. She is a former Director of the…
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