Natalie Alkiviadou, Book author and Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Free Speech, Vanderbilt University

Before joining the Open Society Institute and the Soros Foundations as President in September 1993, Aryeh Neier spent twelve years as Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, of which he was a founder in 1978. Prior to that position, he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union for fifteen years, including eight as national Executive Director. Mr. Neier served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University for more than a dozen years [1978-1991] and has lectured at a number of the country’s leading universities and at universities in many other countries. He is the recipient of six honorary doctorates (State University of New York-Binghamton, Hofstra University, Hamilton College, American University, University of Connecticut, John Jay College of Criminal Justice) and the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award.

The author of six books (Dossier [1975]; Crime and Punishment: A Radical Solution [1976], Defending My Enemy [1979], Only Judgment [1982], War Crimes [1998]), and Taking Liberties [2003], Mr. Neier has also contributed chapters to more than twenty-five books. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and has also published in such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Policy, Dissent and a number of law journals. For a dozen years he wrote a column on human rights for The Nation.  He has contributed more than a hundred and fifty op-ed articles to newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and The International Herald Tribune. Many of his articles have been syndicated internationally.

Mr. Neier was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age.  An internationally recognized expert on human rights, he has conducted investigations of human rights abuses in more than forty countries around the world. For more than two decades he has been directly engaged in efforts to promote compliance with international humanitarian law (the laws of armed conflict), and in the global debate on accountability, bringing to justice those who have committed crimes against humanity. He played a leading role in the establishment of the international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia.

Mishi Choudhary, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Virtru

Mishi Choudhary is a technology lawyer and an online civil liberties activist with law practice in New York and New Delhi. She currently serves as Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Virtru, a global data encryption and digital privacy provider. With over 17 years of legal experience, Mishi has served as a legal representative for many of the world’s most prominent free and open source software developers and distributors, including the Free Software Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation, Debian, the Apache Software Foundation, and OpenSSL. The Open magazine called her an emerging legal guardian of the free and open internet.

In 2010, she founded SFLC.in. She served as its President and Executive Director until 2017. Under her direction, SFLC.in has become the premier non-profit organization representing the rights of Internet users and free software developers in India. One of the lead counsels for Mouthshut.com, a writ petition challenging online free speech and intermediary liability, Mishi Choudhary helped win the Shreya Singhal vs Union of India case in which the Supreme Court delivered a landmark verdict, ruling Section 66A of the Information Technology Act as unconstitutional. She was also part of the coalition that worked on the Network Neutrality campaign in India that put a stop to Freebasics by Facebook in India. Recently, SFLC.in members were petitioners in the landmark unanimous judgment delivered by the Indian Supreme Court holding the Right to privacy as a fundamental right.

As of 2017, Mishi was the only lawyer in the world to simultaneously appear on briefs in the US and Indian Supreme Courts in the same term. In 2015, she was named one of the Asia Society’s 21 young leaders building Asia’s future. In 2016, she was inducted into the Aspen Global Leadership Network by the Aspen Institute. She advises Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression project and serves on the Board of IFEX and Global Network Initiative.

In addition to an LLM from Columbia Law School, she has an LLB degree and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Delhi. Mishi is a member of the Bar Council of Delhi, licensed to appear before the Supreme Court of India, all the State High Courts in India, in the State of New York, and before the Southern District of New York.

Hawley Johnson, Associate Director, Columbia Global Freedom of Expression

Dr. Hawley Johnson is the Associate Director of Columbia Global Freedom of Expression. Since 2014 she has managed the development of the Case Law Database which hosts analyses of seminal freedom of expression court rulings from more than 130 countries.  Hawley has over twelve years of experience in international media development both academically and professionally, with a focus on Eastern Europe. From 2013-2014 she worked with the award-winning Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project to launch the Investigative Dashboard (ID), a joint effort with Google Ideas offering specialized databases and research tools for journalists in emerging democracies.  Previously, as the Associate Director of the Media and Conflict Resolution Program at New York University, she oversaw the implementation of over eight US government sponsored media development programs in eleven countries. In 2012, she completed her Ph.D. in Communications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her dissertation – a study of the evolution of media development policies in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Macedonia – was grounded in extensive field research in the region. She has a M.A. from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a B.A. in International Affairs from the School of International Service at American University.