Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University’s 19th president in 2002 and was the longest serving Ivy League president when he concluded his service as Columbia’s president at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year. He is the founder of Global Freedom of Expression. Under his leadership, Columbia stands again at the very top rank of great research universities, distinguished by comprehensive academic excellence, an innovative and sustainable approach to global engagement, the largest capital campaign in Ivy League history, and the institution’s most ambitious campus expansion in over a century.

Bollinger is Columbia’s first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Law School faculty, and one of the country’s foremost First Amendment scholars. Each fall semester, he teaches “Freedom of Speech and Press” to Columbia undergraduate students. His latest book, The Free Speech Century, co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone, was published in the fall of 2018 by Oxford University Press.

Bollinger is a director of Graham Holdings Company (formerly The Washington Post Company) and serves as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. From 2007 to 2012, he was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he also served as Chair from 2010 to 2012.

From 1996 to 2002, Bollinger was the President of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He led the university’s historic litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, Supreme Court decisions that upheld and clarified the importance of diversity as a compelling justification for affirmative action in higher education. He speaks and writes frequently about the value of racial, cultural, and socio-economic diversity through columns, interviews, and appearances around the country and across the world.

Dr. Agnès Callamard is Secretary General at Amnesty International. She leads the organization’s human rights work and is its chief spokesperson. She is responsible for providing overall leadership of the International Secretariat, including setting the strategic direction for the organization and managing relations with Amnesty International’s national entities.

Dr. Callamard is the former Director of Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression, an initiative seeking to advance understanding on freedom of expression global norms, and Special Adviser to the President of Columbia University, first amendment scholar Lee Bollinger.

She is also the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial summary or arbitrary Executions.

Dr. Agnès Callamard has a distinguished career in human rights and humanitarian work globally. She spent nine years as the Executive Director of ARTICLE 19, the international human rights organization promoting and defending freedom of expression and access to information globally. Under her leadership, ARTICLE 19 reach and reputation flourished earning global recognition for its cutting edge public policy thinking on diverse issues including national security, equality and development. She founded and led HAP International (the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership), which is the first self-regulatory body for humanitarian agencies at the international level. Prior to this, Dr. Callamard was Chef de Cabinet for the Secretary General of Amnesty International (AI) and AI’s Research-Policy Coordinator, leading AI’s policy work and research on women’s human rights.

Agnès has advised senior levels of multilateral organizations and governments around the world and has led human rights investigations in more than 30 countries. She has published broadly in the field of human rights, women’s rights, refugee movements and accountability and holds a PhD in Political Science from the New School for Social Research in New York.

Dr. Yaman Akdeniz (LLB, MA, PhD) is a Professor of Law at the Human Rights Law Research Center, Faculty of Law and the Pro Rector for the Istanbul Bilgi University. Between 2001 and 2009, Akdeniz was at the School of Law, University of Leeds. He established Cyber-Rights.Org in the UK. More recently, Akdeniz was appointed as an ‘elected independent expert’ to the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Rights of Internet Users, and to the Council of Europe Committee of experts on cross-border flow of Internet traffic and Internet freedom. His recent publications include Internet Child Pornography and the Law: National and International Responses and Racism on the Internet. Akdeniz also authored the 2006 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Office entitled Stocktaking on efforts to combat Racism on the Internet; the 2010 Report of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media entitled Turkey and InternetCensorship; and 2011 Report of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media entitled Freedom of Expression on the Internet: Study of legal provisions and practices related to freedom of expression, the free flow of information and media pluralism on the Internet in OSCE participating States.

Sheikh Maytham Al Salman is a Shia cleric from Bahrain. An internationally respected inter-faith leader and a renowned thought leader, Maytham Al Salman advocates for peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between cultures, religions and sects.

Sheikh Maytham Al Salman is the founding member and current coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa Civil Society Coalition to Counter Incitement to Hatred; a multi-stakeholder platform, established in April 2015, that is dedicated to ending incitement to violence, hostility, and discrimination. The Coalition monitors, analyses and reports on incitement speech across the region, and promotes interventions to counter such incitement.

Maytham is the director of Bahrain Inter-Faith, a non-profit organization seeking to prevent religious and social discrimination and sectarianism, and working to encourage and support interfaith dialogue.

Maytham serves on a committee of the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, advising the Office on the role of religious leaders in preventing incitement that could lead to atrocity crimes. He is also an expert associated with Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression, an initiative established by Columbia University President and first amendment scholar Lee Bollinger, to explore, and promote global norms on the protection of freedom of expression.

Maytham Al Salman is also a member of a number of inter-faith international initiatives, including the International Council for Religious Dialogue, the International Commission for Religious Freedom, the International Religious Committee for Cooperation with the United Nations and the World Association of religious tolerance. He is an active participant and contributor to human rights forums, including the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Forum for the Rights of Minorities. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, the World Forum of Religious Tolerance, the International Conference for Cultural Diplomacy, the International Conference for Interreligious Dialogue and the World Conference Dialogue among Civilizations, the International Conference for Islamic Unity.

Above all, Sheikh Maytham is an advocate for equal rights, tolerance and the end of discrimination, including in his own country of Bahrain. In 2011, in punishment for his advocacy, he was arrested, detained for several months and was tortured as were a number of other human rights defenders, some of whom are still in prison.

Natalie is Senior Research Fellow at Justitia, working on the Future of Free Speech project.

Her research interests lie in the freedom of expression, the far-right, hate speech, hate crime and non-discrimination. She holds a PhD (Law) from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has published three monographs, namely ‘The Far-Right in International and European Law’ (Routledge 2019), ‘Legal Challenges to the Far-right: Lessons from England and Wales’ (Routledge 2019) and ‘The Far-Right in Greece and the Law’ (Routledge 2022). She has published on hate speech, free speech and the far-right in a wide range of peer reviewed journals, has been reviewer for journals such as the International Journal of Human Rights, The Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights and guest editor for the International Journal of Semiotics and the Law. Natalie has over ten years experience in working with civil society, educators and public servants on human rights education and has participated in European actions such as the High-Level Group on Combatting Racism, Xenophobia and Other Forms of Intolerance. Natalie has been the country researcher for the 2019 European Network against Racism report on Hate Crime and the 2022 report on structural racism. She has drafted handbooks, strategy papers and shadow reports for projects funded by the Anna Lindh Foundation, the European Commission and the European Youth Foundation, on themes such as hate speech. Natalie is an international Fellow (2022/23) of the ISLC – Information Society Law Centre of the Università degli Studi di Milano.

Catherine Anite is the Senior Programme Officer, Media, Safety and Protection at ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa. She previously worked with Danish Refugee Council, Association of Female Lawyers (FIDA) and Uganda Human Rights Commission. Currently, her focus as a human rights advocate is on freedom of expression and the media. From 2012 to 2015 she was Chief Legal Officer at the Human Rights Network for Journalists in Uganda, where she engaged in public interest litigation on free speech issues, represented journalists, pursued policy analysis, and spearheaded national and regional advocacy campaigns on behalf of journalists and other media practitioners. She successfully argued a case which created new jurisprudence on open justice for journalists in Uganda and is at the fore of litigation in the East African Court attempting to decriminalize defamation.  She has served as a senior judge at the International media law moot court at the University of Oxford, and received a Mandela Washington Fellowship from the U.S. State Department in 2014, where she studied civic leadership at the University of Delaware and attended President Obama’s summit for young African leaders in Washington D.C.  In 2016, she was a Legal Fellow at the Centre for Law and Democracy in Canada, and at the International Centre for Not for Profit Law in Washington D.C. She is also a researcher for the Global Freedom of Expression project at Columbia University.

Catherine earned an LLM in International Human Rights Law from Notre Dame University, USA graduating Magna Cum Laude, an LLB with honors from Makerere University, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice from the Law Development Centre, Kampala, Uganda.

Galina Arapova is director and senior media lawyer of the NGO Mass Media Defence Centre (Russia). She is a trustee of the human rights organization ARTICLE 19; Russian national expert on admissibility of the Council of Europe’s HELP program (Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals); and a member of the International Media Lawyers Association. She undertook post graduate studies at the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations (Russian Academy of Sciences). She graduated from the European Law Institute (Birmingham, UK) in human rights law where she completed a practice program conducted with the Council of Europe. She is a Member of the UNECSO chair on Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Rights at the Institute of International Law and Economics (Moscow). Galina is the author of many publications on Russian media law and international standards in the field of freedom of expression, freedom of information, defamation, and Internet regulation. She is a practicing media lawyer, and has taken a number of cases to the European Court of Human Rights. She has wide experience as a lecturer and trainer on legal issues related to defamation, freedom of expression, freedom of information, and Article 10 of ECHR case law.

Chinmayi Arun is Assistant Professor of Law and founder of the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi. She is a member of the Indian Government’s multi stakeholder advisory group for the India Internet Governance Forum and one of the academic experts for the Internet & Jurisdiction Project’s Observatory. She has also been a consultant to the Law Commission of India.

Chinmayi has published academic papers on surveillance and the right to privacy in India, and on information gatekeeper liability in the context of internet intermediaries. She is lead author of the India country report in Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net report and the India report in the Global Network of Centres’ study of online intermediaries which was led by the Berkman Centre at Harvard Law School.

She has been invited to discuss her work at academic institutions like Oxford University and Harvard University, as well as at fora convened by international bodies like UNESCO. In an effort to make sure that her work is accessible and has impact, Chinmayi has participated and supported the government delegation in events such as the World Conference on International Telecommunications. She designed and is building an online information policy teaching and learning resource.

Chinmayi has studied at the NALSAR University of Law, and London School of Economics and Political Science. At the LSE, she read regulatory theory and new media regulation, and was awarded the Bernard Levin Award for Student Journalism. She has worked with Ernst & Young and AZB & Partners, Mumbai in the past, and has taught at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences where she introduced courses on regulatory theory and communication regulation. She teaches seminar courses on Internet Governance at National Law University Delhi.

From 2002-2013, Hossam Bahgat was the founding executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, where he still remains as chairman.  He recently became an investigative journalist for the independent news service Mada Masr.  A journalist and human rights defender with a background in political science and international human rights law, Hossam is based in Cairo.  He serves as board chair of the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net), a member of the board of directors of the Fund for Global Human Rights, and an advisory board member of the Open Society Foundation’s Arab Regional Office and its Justice Initiative.  In 2010, Human Rights Watch awarded Hossam the Allison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism.

Robert Balin is a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and Co-Chair of a Media Law Practice Group. He is also an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. Robert represents clients in all aspects of media law, including defamation, privacy, news gathering torts, First Amendment issues, copyright and trademark litigation and contracts. He handles complex litigation for multinational and national corporations, including publishers, broadcasters and new media. Robert’s clients include: 02138 magazine, adidas, Business Week, CNN, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Thomas Friedman, Henry Holt and Company, Random House, Reader’s Digest, St. Martin’s Press, Woman’s World, Yellow Book USA, and Sing Tao Daily. He frequently writes and lectures on media law issues and is a contributor to the Media Law Resource Center’s monthly MediaLawLetter.

Sindre Bangstad is a social anthropologist based in Norway, and works as a researcher at KIFO (Institute For Church, Religion and Worldview Research) in Oslo. He holds a cand. polit. degree in anthropology from the University of Bergen in Norway (2002) and a PhD in religious studies from Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands (2007). He is the author of inter alia Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (Zed Books, 2014), The Politics of Mediated Presence: Exploring The Voices Of Muslims In Norway’s Mediated Public Spheres (Scandinavian Academic Press, 2015) and the forthcoming edited volume Anthropology in Our Times: From A Series In Public Anthropology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). Bangstad has a background from ethnographic research on Muslims in South Africa and Norway and has published in leading international scholarly journals. His recent work in the anthropology of law and human rights explores racism and Islamophobia and the intersections between free speech and hate speech with particular reference to the case of Norway. He blogs at:    http://www.sindrebangstad.com/ and maintains a professional page at: https://uio.academia.edu/SindreBangstad

Joan Barata works on freedom of expression, media regulation, and intermediary liability issues. He is a Senior Fellow at Justitias Future Free Speech project. He is a Fellow of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. He has published a large number of articles and books on these subjects, both in academic and popular press. His work has taken him in most regions of the world, and he is regularly involved in projects with international organizations such as UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, where he was the principal advisor to the Representative on Media Freedom. Joan Barata also has experience as a regulator, as he held the position of Secretary General of the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia in Spain and was member of the Permanent Secretariat of the Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities.

Elazar Barkan is a Professor of International and Public Affairs and the Director of the Human Rights Concentration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. His research interests focus on human rights and on the role of history in contemporary society and politics and the response to gross historical crimes and injustices. His books include Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution, (edited book with Karen Barkey, Columbia University Press, 2014) No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation (with Howard Adelman, Columbia University Press 2011); The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (2000); Claiming the Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity, (an edited volume with Ronald Bush, Getty, 2003); and Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (an edited volume with Alexander Karn, Stanford University Press, 2006).

Emily Bell was director of digital content for Britain’s Guardian News and Media from 2006 to 2010. Previous to that post, Bell was editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited from 2001 to 2006. Under Bell, the Guardian received numerous awards, including the Webby Award for a newspaper website in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009, and British Press Awards for Website of the Year in 2006, 2008 and 2009. Bell first joined the Observer newspaper, which became part of Guardian News and Media, in 1990, as a business reporter specializing in media business, marketing and technology. Bell is a leading media commentator in the U.K., writing about broadcasting and media policy issues. She is a 1987 graduate of Christ Church, Oxford University, where she earned a master’s degree in jurisprudence.

Mehdi Benchelah, Senior Project Officer, Section for Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists, UNESCO. Mehdi Benchelah is a senior project officer at UNESCO and is coordinating the Rule of Law, Policy and Freedom of Expression Team within the Section for Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists. He coordinates the Judges’ Initiative, a global strategy for the judiciary systems on freedom of expression, access to information and safety of journalists, by fostering strategic partnerships with Regional Human Rights Courts, Supreme Courts, Judicial Training Institutes and Prosecutors’ Offices across the world. He also coordinates the implementation of an initiative to train law enforcement officers on human rights, freedom of expression and safety of journalists’ related issues, as well as their relationship with the media. He is also in charge of the Media and Elections programme to tackle disinformation and violence during election periods while respecting international standards on freedom of expression.

Mehdi Benchelah was posted in Haiti from 2010 to 2011 following the 2010 earthquake to coordinate UNESCO emergency programmes for the recovery of the media sector and the initiatives to support the culture sector. He was the Head of UNESCO Office in Tunisia from 2012 to 2014 following the Revolution and democratic transition, and coordinated the support of the media law reform, capacity-building activities for the media including in times of election, and other activities to support national authorities and civil society organizations.

Prior to joining UNESCO, Mehdi worked for a decade as a freelance reporter covering international affairs and conflicts in the Arab region, Africa and Latin America. Notably, he covered the Algerian civil war, the Second Intifada in Palestine and Israel, the Iraq war following the United States’ 2003 invasion, and the drugs war in Latin America. He was the permanent correspondent of Radio France and the leading magazine Le Point while he was based in the Gaza strip covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Middle East news from 1998 to 2000.

A graduate of the Law School of Sorbonne University Paris I with a Masters’ degree in Law, he is the author of non-fiction: Le Pèlerin de Jerusalem (with Jean Lecuyer, J.C Lattes publishing 2000), Journal d’Algérie 1991-2001 (with Michael Von Graffenried, 2003) and fictions books: Les flamboyants de Gaza (Cherche Midi publishing 2004) and Bassora-Express (Cherche Midi publishing 2006).

Guy Berger is Director for Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO. His remit includes the world press freedom day, safety of journalists, internet freedom, media pluralism, journalism education and grant-making by the International Programme for the Development of Communication. Before joining UNESCO, he was the Head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, where he led the development of the Africa Media Matrix facility, the Highway Africa conference, and the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership. In September 2011, he convened the Pan African Conference on Access to Information to mark the 20^th anniversary of UNESCO’s Windhoek Conference on a Free, Pluralistic and Independent Press. Berger has published extensively on and in the news media. He has won several awards, including the Fulbright Alumnus Award, the Fulbright African Research Fellowship Award, the Nat Nakasa Award for Media Integrity from the South African National Editors Forum, and the Allan Kirkland Soga Lifetime Achiever award. He holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Rhodes University.

Professor Eduardo Bertoni (PhD, Buenos Aires University) is currently the Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the American University Washington College of Law. Representative of the Regional Office for South America of the Inter American Institute of Human Rights until December 2023. First Director of the Access to Public Information Agency (AAIP) which is the Argentine Data Protection and Access to Information Authority. Founder and director of the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) at Palermo University School of Law, Argentina. Executive Director of the Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF) until May, 2006. Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights at the Organization of American States (2002-2005). Teaching Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University School of Law (2001). Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow (2012-13) at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Former member of the advisory boards of the Human Rights Initiative (Open Society Foundations), the Media Legal Defence Initiative, the Freedom of Information Advocates Network (FOIAnet), among others. Dr. Bertoni has also worked as an advisor to the Department of Justice and Human Rights in Argentina. He is an Argentinean lawyer and holds a Masters in International Policy and Practice from the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Prof. Bertoni taught at Buenos Aires University School of Law and New York University School of Law (Global Clinical Professor), among others universities. He published several opinion pieces on democracy and human rights in leading newspapers in the Americas and has written several publications on judicial reforms, international criminal law and human rights & Internet.

Esha Bhandari is deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where she works on litigation and advocacy to protect freedom of expression and privacy rights in the digital age. She also focuses on the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on civil liberties. She has litigated cases including Sandvig v. Barr, a First Amendment challenge to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on behalf of researchers who test for housing and employment discrimination online, and Alasaad v. Wolf, a challenge to suspicionless electronic device searches at the U.S. border.

Esha was previously a senior staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Before that, she was an Equal Justice Works fellow with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, where she was involved in litigating cases concerning a right to counsel in immigration proceedings and immigration detainer policies. Esha is a graduate of McGill University, where she was a Loran Scholar and received the Allen Oliver Gold Medal in Political Science, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Fernando Henrique De Oliveira Biolcati is a Judge of Law of the Court of Justice of São Paulo (TJSP, Brazil) and has experience with an emphasis on Civil Law. He graduated in Law from the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo (USP). He has a Master and PhD in Civil Law from the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo (USP), and his dissertation was a study on fake news, freedom of expression and civil liability of social networks.

As a practising barrister and Queen’s Counsel, Nicolas Bratza was elected as the United Kingdom member of the European Commission of Human Rights in 1993. In 1998 he was appointed a High Court judge and elected as the first United Kingdom judge of the permanent European Court of Human Rights. In the same year he was elected as one of the Section Presidents of the Court and in 2007 was elected as one of the Court’s two Vice-Presidents. In 2011 he was elected as President of the Court, a post he held until his retirement from the Court and from the High Court in October 2012. He is a member of the International Commission of Jurists and currently chairs an International Advisory Panel overseeing the investigation into the violent events in Kyiv and Odessa, Ukraine at the end of 2013 and the early part of 2014.

Aurélie Bretonneau is member of the French Conseil d’Etat since 2007. She is currently serving in the litigation department, as rapporteur public (advocate general) appointed to the chamber specialised in public liberties, administrative police and taxes. She previously ran the Center of judicial research and the comparative law service of the Conseil d’Etat.

Barbora Bukovská has been ARTICLE 19’s Senior Director for Law and Policy since 2009. She leads on the development of all ARTICLE 19 policies and provides legal oversight and support to legal work across the organization. Barbora has an extensive experience working with various organisations on a range of human rights issues, including protection from discrimination, access to justice, deprivation of liberty, reproductive rights and community development. She also initiated about 50 cases at the European Court of Human Rights on these issues and has published a number of reports and articles on a broad range of human rights. From 2006 to 2008, she was the Legal Director at the Mental Disability Advocacy Centre, an international organization working on the rights of people with disabilities in Europe and Central Asia. She graduated from the Law School of Charles University in Prague and has earned a doctorate degree in law in Slovakia and an LLM degree from Harvard Law School. In 1998 and 1999, she was a visiting scholar at the Columbia University Law School in New York.

Lydia Cacho is a Mexican award wining journalist; author and Human Rights activist specialized in women and children’s rights.  Her ample knowledge has led her to write nine books, from poetry to fiction, nonfiction investigative reporting and a Manual to prevent child abuse, she has published essays on gender issues and a 2014 investigation on the love life of mature Mexicans. Her international best seller on Sex Trafficking, Human Slavery and Child Pornography have been translated into twelve languages and sell in more than thirty countries around the world. She has received notable recognition for traveling around the world investigating Human Rights violations and organized criminal networks

Cacho has developed specialized tools to confront complex problems and search for real solutions using her grassroots experience as an author, an international reporter of Human Rights and as a well recognized founder of shelters for women and children victims of gender violence including sexual violence and Human Trafficking. Her approach to teaching new skills for Peace Journalism and to confront Human Trafficking and slavery around the world has gained her several awards and international prizes.

Lydia´s knowledge of different Law systems, psychology and pedagogy has led her to develop an effective teaching system using all resources including creative writing, narrative listening, art-therapy, techniques to interview children, and reporting organized crime with group collaboration skills. She has received 40 international Human Rights and journalism awards including the Human Rights Watch, Ginetta Sagan Amnesty Award; OXFAM award; IWMF award; CNN Hero; UNESCO- Guillermo Cano freedom of expression award; The Wallemberg Medal; The Tucholsky Award; PEN Canada Award; and World Press International Hero 2010 for the International Press Institute in Vienna.

She is an international Board member of Article 19; Chime for Change Fund; Oasis Foundation and of the House Citlaltepetl for persecuted writers. She has been a member of the jury of the international human rights film festivals in Mexico.

Mishi Choudhary is a technology lawyer, licensed to practice in New York and India with over a decade of experience in the area of intellectual property rights, Open Source licensing, e- commerce, privacy, surveillance, platform liability and user free expression. She has been involved in a number of court cases and other efforts around protection of online free speech and expression; privacy; surveillance and software patents in India. She is the Founding Executive Director of SFLC.in, India, a legal services organization based out of New Delhi that brings together lawyers, policy analysts, technologists, and students to protect freedom in the digital world. At SFLC.in, she focuses her work on promotion of innovation and open access to knowledge by helping developers make great Free and Open Source Software, protect privacy and civil liberties for citizens in the digital world, educate policy makers to reach informed decisions on the use and adoption of technology. She is also the Legal Director at Software Freedom Law Center, New York that provides pro-bono legal services to developers of Free, Libre, and Open Source Software. Mishi has a Masters degree in Law from Columbia University in the City of New York, a Legum Baccalaureus (LL.B.) degree with Honors and a Bachelors degree in Political Science from the University of Delhi.

Sarah joined ARTICLE 19 in January 2019 as Head of the Europe and Central Asia team, defending the human rights to freedom of expression and information in the region. Between 2012 and 2018, she led PEN International’s policy and advocacy work, overseeing its engagement with the UN and regional human rights mechanisms and governments. She is the author of numerous PEN International country-specific and thematic reports concerning legal restrictions on free expression and the protection of writers and journalists at risk. She has a particular interest in freedom of expression in Turkey, where she has led numerous advocacy missions, trial observations and the amicus interventions on the priority cases of journalists before the European Court of Human Rights. She regularly publishes, lectures and gives trainings on a variety of freedom of expression issues.

Sarah has consulted for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, OSCE and Oxford and Harvard universities on issues relating to freedom of expression, asylum and forced migration. She speaks Spanish and is graduate of Oxford University, Trinity College Dublin and BPP Law School. She is currently training as a barrister at the English Bar where she is an Exhibition Scholar of the Inner Temple.

Professor Sarah Cleveland is a noted expert in international and comparative human rights law. In 2014, she was nominated by the United States and elected to serve a four-year term as an independent expert on the U.N. Human Rights Committee. She is the Co-Coordinating Reporter of the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, and the U.S. Member on the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. From 2009 to 2011, Cleveland served as the Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where she supervised the office’s legal work relating to the law of war, counterterrorism, and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and assisted with its international human rights and international justice work. She continues to serve as a member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law and is a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and a Council Member of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. A former Rhodes Scholar, Cleveland holds a baccalaureate degree from Brown University, a master’s degree from Oxford University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and Judge Louis Oberdorfer on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2007, she previously taught at the Harvard, Michigan, and University of Texas law schools and at Oxford University. Cleveland has written widely on issues of international law, human rights, and U.S. foreign relations law, including co-authoring Louis Henkin’s Human Rights casebook (2nd ed. 2009 and update 2013).

Amal Clooney is a barrister who specializes in international law and human rights. She represents clients before international courts, including the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights. Alongside court work, she provides advice to governments and individuals on legal issues in her areas of expertise.

Mrs. Clooney served as a senior advisor to Kofi Annan when he was the UN’s Envoy on Syria. She also served as Counsel to the UN Inquiry on the use of armed drones led by the Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights. She is a member of the UK’s team of experts on preventing sexual violence in conflict zones. And, she was recently appointed to the UK Attorney General’s expert panel set up to advise and represent the UK government in cases involving public international law.

Prior to joining the London Bar, Mrs. Clooney worked in The Hague with various UN- sponsored justice mechanisms, including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. She is also admitted to the New York Bar and practiced as a litigation attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York. She speaks English, French, and Arabic.

Sandra Coliver is the former Senior Legal Officer for Freedom of Information and Expression at the Open Society Justice Initiative, an operational arm of the Open Society Foundations. Previously, she managed or participated in human rights and rule of law programs around the world, including with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the OSCE, and Article 19. She coordinated the drafting of the Tshwane Principles on National Security and Right to Information (2013), helped develop the Johannesburg Principles on National Security, FOE and Access to Information (1995), and wrote a commentary and edited a book on that theme (published by Martinus Nijhoff); wrote a Handbook on FOE Best Law and Practice; edited a book on hate speech laws and practice in more than two dozen countries; and co-authored two other books on freedom of expression and information issues. She has submitted several interventions to the European and Inter-American Human Rights systems, and contributed to the UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment on Article 19. She served on the Faculty of the Summer Program on International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at AU Washington College of Law, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley Law School.

Sheila S. Coronel is concurrently director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and Stabile professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s Graduate School of. She began her reporting career in the Philippines, where she cofounded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism to promote investigative reporting on major social issues, including the military, poverty, and corruption. She is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Coups, Cults & Cannibals, The Rule-makers: How the Wealthy and Well-Born Dominate Congress, and Pork and other Perks: Corruption and Governance in the Philippines. She has received numerous awards for her work, including Asia’s most prestigious prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, in 2003. In 2011, she was awarded the Presidential Teaching Award by Columbia University. She sits on the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Media Development Investment Fund, the Columbia Journalism Review, the National Security Archive, Correctiv and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

Laurence Cuny is a human rights lawyer and researcher. After three years as teaching assistant in international public law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, she joined the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) as program manager of the Observatory for the protection of human rights defenders. Between 2008 and 2018 she worked on project support in evaluation and training for the EU and for NGOs (Freemuse, PEN America). Since 2011, her work focuses on cultural rights and artistic freedom. She collaborates on a regular basis with the mandate of the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights (artistic freedom, marketing practices and cultural rights, cultural rights and pulic spaces, cultural righs and migration). She has been a member of the UNESCO expert group on the 2005 Cultural Diversity Convention since 2018. In this capacity she authored the report Freedom & Creativity: Defending art, Defending diversity in 2020 and has helped the Secretariat develop a training programme on artistic freedom in the digital environment for Central American countries. As a researcher she is affiliated with the UNESCO Chair on the diversity of cultural expressions at the faculty of Law, Université Laval in Québec and IREDIES, Paris I Sorbonne. Her recent publications focus on relocation of artists at risk in Latin America (Ifa, 2020), working conditions and status of the artist (IFACCA, 2022), artistic freedom in the digital environment (Lex Electronica, 2023), art and Human rights (Elgar, 2023).

Richard Danbury runs the Channel 4 MA in investigative journalism at De Montfort University in Leicester, where he’s an associate professor. He is a consultant for Oxford University’s Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy, where for a number of years he has worked on the international Price Media Law Moot competition. He’s an associate at Cambridge University’s Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, and an associate research fellow at London University’s Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. He was a barrister, then for a decade a journalist at the BBC. He is an academic participant in the Global Network Initiative. His undergraduate degree is in philosophy from Cambridge, and his doctorate is in law from Oxford. He undertook post-doctoral research at Cambridge into copyright and news. He currently writes and researches in the area of comparative media law practice and theory. He still practices as a freelance journalist, mainly working on live political programmes.

Agustina Del Campo, LL.M., Esq. is the Director at the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) at Universidad de Palermo and an international human rights consultant. Ms. Del Campo has a law degree from Universidad Catolica Argentina and an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from American University Washington College of Law. She previously ran the Impact Litigation Project at AU WCL where she coordinated the research and litigation of several freedom of expression cases before the Inter-American Commission and Court on Human Rights. Agustina has extensive experience in human rights training, particularly as it relates to freedom of expression and the press in the Inter-American human rights system. She taught and lectured in several Latin American countries and the U.S. Additionally, Agustina has authored and/or contributed to over a dozen publications.

H.R. Dipendra is a lawyer practising in Kuala Lumpur. His practice includes protecting and promoting media defence and freedom of expression within the Southeast Asia region. Dipendra is involved in projects including training of lawyers and media activists in the Southeast Asian region and has participated in trial observer missions and other case interventions. In addition, Dipendra is currently the Chairman of the Kuala Lumpur State Bar Committee, the largest State Bar in Peninsula Malaysia with approximately 7,300 lawyers. He also chairs the Professional Standards and Development Committee at the Malaysian Bar Council and the Civil Practice Committee at the Kuala Lumpur Bar Committee. Dipendra is also a member of the Malaysian Bar Council Human Rights Committee. Dipendra was admitted to the Malaysian Bar in 2000 and is the managing partner of Messrs Arianti Dipendra Jeremiah. He holds a LLB from the University of London and graduated with a LLM (merit) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1999.

Michael W. Doyle is the Director of the Columbia Global Policy Initiative and the Harold Brown Professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University. His current research focuses on international law and international relations. His major publications include Ways of War and Peace (W.W. Norton); Empires (Cornell University Press); Making War and Building Peace (Princeton Press); Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict (Princeton Press); and The Question of Intervention: J.S. Mill and the Responsibility to Protect (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2014). He served as Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning and Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan where his responsibilities included strategic planning (the “Millennium Development Goals”), outreach to the international corporate sector (the “Global Compact’) and relations with Washington. He also served as an individual member and the chair of the UN Democracy Fund from 2006 through 2013.

Ronan graduated from the National University of Ireland, Galway with a first-class master’s degree in law, and was vice president of the university’s student law society. His main research interests are media law and freedom of expression, and he is a former legal researcher with the Irish national public broadcaster (RTÉ). Ronan completed his doctoral dissertation at Ghent University, Belgium, on freedom of expression and the chilling effect doctrine, under the guidance of Professor Dirk Voorhoof. He has published his work in a number of law reviews, including the Journal of Media Law, European Human Rights Law Review, Hibernian Law Journal, Columbia Journal of European Law, and European Human Rights Cases, and is a regular contributor to the Strasbourg Observers blog. Ronan is spending spring 2014 at Columbia Law School as a research fellow.

Ona Flores is a senior attorney at the OAS Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression. She is a lawyer from Venezuela and holds a Master of Laws (LL.M) from Columbia University Law School (2007), where she was a Fulbright fellow and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She worked as an attorney at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for six years and worked as a researcher and program coordinator at the Center for Human Rights of the Universidad de Chile.

Professor Gelber researches freedom of speech, human rights and public discourse. She is the recipient of several ARC grants on these topics, including a Future Fellowship (2012-2015): ‘Free Speech After 9/11’. In November-December 2017, she was a Visiting Scholar at Global Freedom of Expression, Columbia University, New York. In 2014, with Prof Luke McNamara, she was awarded the Mayer journal article prize for the best article in the Australian Journal of Political Science in 2013. In 2011 she was invited by the United Nations to be the Australian Expert Witness at a regional meeting examining States’ compliance with the free speech and racial hatred provisions of international law. In 2009 she presented the Mitchell Oration in Adelaide on the topic ‘Freedom of Speech and its Limits’.

Professor Gelber is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia, and an elected member of the Academic Board, University of Queensland 2018-2020. She is a former President of the Australian Political Studies Association, and still serves on its Executive Committee. She is Chair of the Local Organising Committee for the 2018 World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Brisbane.

Alberto Godioli is Associate Professor at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), and program director of the Netherlands Research for Literary Studies (OSL). His research focuses on humor and free speech jurisprudence from an interdisciplinary perspective. He is principal investigator of an international research project on this topic (Humor in Court, NWO Vidi Grant, 2022-2027), in dialogue with stakeholders such as Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, 

Cartoon Movement and Cartoonists’ Rights Network International. In 2022, together with Prof. Laura Little, he founded ForHum: Forum for Humor and the Law – a global platform bringing together lawyers, humor scholars, artists and other key actors interested in humor, freedom of expression and related legal matters. His publications on the subject include Humor and Free Speech: A Comparative Analysis of Global Case Law (with Jennifer Young; Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, Special Collection, 2023), Laughing Matters: Humor, Free Speech and Hate Speech at the European Court of Human Rights (with Jennifer Young and Matteo Fiori; International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 2022), and the special issue Humor and the Law: The Difficulty of Judging Jests (co-edited with Brigitte Adriaensen, Andrew Bricker and Ted Laros, HUMOR, 2022).

Gabrielle Guillemin is Senior Legal Officer at ARTICLE 19, an international free speech organisation based in London. She has been leading the organisation’s work on internet policy since 2011. She is a member of the UK Multistakeholder Advisory Group on Internet Governance (MAGIG) and an independent expert attached to the Council of Europe committee on Cross-border flow of Internet traffic and Internet Freedoms. Prior to ARTICLE 19, Gabrielle worked as a Registry lawyer at the European Court of Human Rights for four years. She holds a double degree in English and French law (Hons) from King’s College London-Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne and an MSc Human Rights (Distinction) from the London School of Economics. She was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2006

Mark Hannah received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His research investigates the changing cultures of news production and consumption within in a global context. This encompasses various forms commercialization and professionalization, the increasing influence of user-generated content, and ​how these trends relate to the​  proliferation of certain political attitudes and beliefs (e.g., nationalism, populism, etc.) He previously studied  ​at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.S.) ​

​An adjunct faculty member at New York University, he has also taught courses on media and politics at The New School and Queens College. ​ Before entering an academic career, he spent a decade working in ​professional politics and ​progressive advocacy. Formerly a staff member on two U.S. presidential campaigns and a public affairs strategist at a global PR firm, Dr. Hannah has written about media and politics for PBS.org, The Huffington Post, TIME.com, and Politico. He has been a regular commentator on cable news, and ​is the author of  a book about the legacy of the Obama administration, published by HarperCollins in 2016.

He has a longstanding interest in – and commitment to –  ​freedom of expression generally and media freedom ​specifically, and is currently at work on a book about the global ​diffusion of certain characteristics of the U.S. press. He is a member of PEN America, a partner at the Truman National Security Project, a former fellow of the Society for New Communications Research, and a former board member of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

Dave Heller is a staff lawyer with the Media Law Resource Center. Much of his work focuses on MLRC’s international programs and initiatives. He has been involved with the programming and planning of the MLRC London Conference since its inception and this year worked on MLRC’s first conference on Legal Issues Concerning Hispanic and Latin American Media. He has written comments on UK and European media law reform issues, including the new UK Defamation Bill. He is a member of MLRC’s International Media Lawyers Project (IMLP) which has worked to expand MLRC’s membership to lawyers in developing countries. He is also the editor of MLRC‟s monthly MediaLawLetter, and a regular contributor to MLRC’s other publications, including an annual survey of developments in media libel and privacy law.

Dr Sabine Jacques is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool (the UK). Her current research plans revolve around three main research areas: the balance between freedom of expression and intellectual property rights, promoting cultural diversity in creative industries through copyright and algorithmic enforcement of intellectual property law.

Before joining Liverpool University, Sabine gained recognition for her legal and interdisciplinary projects. Some of her notable contributions include: The Parody Exception in Copyright Law (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Playing Field in Audiovisual Advertising (CERRE-funded project, 2019) and The Impact on Cultural Diversity of Automated Anti-Piracy Systems as Copyright Enforcement Mechanisms: An Empirical Study of YouTube’s Content ID Digital Fingerprinting Technology (CREATe funded project, 2017).

Her work has been cited in EU Advocate General’s opinions and quoted by the UK’s specialist court, the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, which is part of the Business and Property Courts of the High Court of Justice. She is also an expert analyst for the EU Law Analysis project, contributing her legal expertise to pertinent issues in European law. She also serves on the advisory board of the Network for Empirical Legal Studies in Intellectual Property (NELSIP), where she actively contributes to the development of empirical research methodologies in intellectual property law.’

Nani Jansen Reventlow is the founding Director of the Digital Freedom Fund, which supports partners in Europe to advance digital rights through strategic litigation. She is also the initiator of the Catalysts for Collaboration project, which offers best practices and case studies encouraging activists to collaborate across disciplinary silos and use strategic litigation in digital rights campaigns.

Nani is a recognised international lawyer and expert in human rights litigation responsible for standard-setting freedom of expression cases across several national and international jurisdictions. She is a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School and Adjunct Professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. She is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and has been an advisor to Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic since 2016.

Hicham Kantar has served as a judge in Lebanon for over 15 years and was a prosecutor in the Financial Prosecution Office of Lebanon where he worked on cases of corruption in the administration and money laundering.

He also taught Human Rights and International Courts and Processes at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. He holds a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in international law and human rights from Columbia Law School, where, in recognition of his superior academic achievement, he was named a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar.

Hicham also worked as a legal consultant for the Independent High-Level Legal Panel of Experts on Global Media Freedom and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, advising on issues of freedom of expression and media freedom, state practices, legislation and case law in the MENA region.

Dr. Karin Deutsch Karlekar is currently Director of Free Expression programs at PEN American Center. She served from 2001-15 as the project director for Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press project, an annual report that tracks trends in global media freedom. She coordinated the research, ratings, and editorial processes for the index, as well as serving as a spokesperson on media issues, representing the organization at meetings and conferences and appearing regularly in the media as an expert on topics including press freedom, internet and digital media freedom, and freedom of expression. She has developed index methodologies and conducted training sessions for Freedom House on internet freedom, freedom of expression, and monitoring dangerous speech; authored a number of special reports and academic papers; and conducted research, assessment, and advocacy missions to Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Prior to joining Freedom House, Dr. Karlekar was an editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit and also served as a consultant to Human Rights Watch. She holds a Ph.D. in Indian History from Cambridge University, England.

David Kaye is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and director of its International Justice Clinic. From 2014 to 2020, he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. He is also the author of Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (2019), Independent Chair of the Board of the Global Network Initiative, and a Trustee of ARTICLE 19. He writes regularly for international and American law journals and media outlets. David began his legal career with the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

Irene Khan is the first woman to be appointed as UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression. She was Secretary General of Amnesty International from 2001 to 2009 and Director General of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) from 2012 – 2019. An internationally recognized advocate for human rights, gender equality and social justice, she is Distinguished Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Steve Killelea is an accomplished entrepreneur in high technology business development and at the forefront of philanthropic activities focused on sustainable development and peace. After successfully building two international software companies, Steve decided to dedicate most of his time and fortune to sustainable development and peace.

Steve has always had a strong passion for sustainable development, and in 2000 he established The Charitable Foundation (TCF), which specializes in working with the poorest communities of the world. TCF is one of the largest private overseas aid organizations in Australia. It aims to provide life-changing interventions reaching as many people as possible with special emphasis on targeting the poorest of the poor. TCF is active in East and Central Africa and parts of Asia and has substantially impacted the lives of over 2.3 million people.

In 2007 Steve founded the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), an international think tank dedicated to building a greater understanding of the interconnection between business, peace and economics with particular emphasis on the economic benefits of peace. IEP’s ground-breaking research includes the Global Peace Index, the world’s leading measure of peacefulness. Steve’s founding of IEP was recognized as one of the 50 most impactful philanthropic gifts in Australia’s history.

Steve currently serves on a number of influential Company Boards, Advisory Boards and President Councils. In 2010 he was honored as Member of the Order of Australia for his service to the global peace movement and the provision of humanitarian aid to the developing world. In 2013 Steve was nominated one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People in Armed Violence Reduction” by the UK group Action on Armed Violence.

András Koltay is Research Professor at the University of Public Service and Professor of Law at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary. He received LL.M. degree in Public Law at the University College London in 2006, and PhD degree in law at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2008. Between 2018 and 2021, he served as Rector of the University of Public Service. He has been the President of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority of Hungary since 2021. His principal research has been concerned with freedom of speech, personality rights and media regulations, but he also deals with other constitutional questions. He was a speaker in more than 200 conferences in several countries. He is the author of New Media and Freedom of Expression (Hart, 2019) and Media Freedom and the Law (Routledge, 2024). He is the co-editor of Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression (Cambridge University Press, 2017, together with Jeroen Temperman), Comparative Privacy and Defamation (Elgar, 2020, together with Paul Wragg), Global Perspectives on Press Regulation, Vol. 1 and 2 (Hart, 2023 and 2024, together with Paul Wragg) and Disinformation, Misinformation, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2024, together with Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr. and Charlotte Garden)

Viviana Krsticevic is a distinguished human rights advocate with extensive academic and professional credentials, including an LL.B. from the University of Buenos Aires, an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. As the Executive Director of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), she leads initiatives across the Americas to promote human rights using international law and the Inter-American System for the Protection of Human Rights. Since December 2022, she has served as an expert on the Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran for the Human Rights Council, presenting a significant report in March 2024. 

Ms. Krsticevic’s career spans impactful litigation in Latin America, advocating before the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights in numerous pivotal cases. She has shaped international human rights standards, notably in accountability, equality, reparations, and social and economic rights, and has pioneered initiatives in women’s rights, economic rights, freedom of expression, and the protection of human rights defenders. 

Since 2020, she has contributed to developing an Advisory Opinion of the IACtHR on the climate emergency and human rights. In January 2023, the request for an Advisory Opinion was pursued by the Governments of Chile and Colombia which submitted the inquiry to the Tribunal. This initiative has generated a wealth of knowledge and has expanded the community of practice in the field, even pending what we expect to be the adoption of a landmark Advisory Opinion by the Tribunal. The process runs parallel to similar debates at the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea Tribunal.   

She is a founder and member of the Gqual Campaign, a global initiative to promote gender parity in international representation, which was launched in 2015. Additionally, Ms. Krsticevic played a pivotal role in developing the international protocol for investigating threats against human rights defenders, which was launched in 2021 and is known as The Esperanza Protocol.

 Her academic contributions include teaching at American University Washington School of Law, conducting research at the Max Planck Institute, and publishing extensively on human rights and international law, significantly influencing discourse and practice in these fields.

Ross LaJeunesse is Global Head of International Relations for Google, where he oversees the company’s efforts to promote and defend a free and open Internet around the world. LaJeunesse has been with Google for more than seven years, and previously served as Head of Government Affairs in Asia Pacific. Before joining Google, LaJeunesse served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He helped develop and execute the Governor’s comprehensive and ambitious policy agenda, including economic development, infrastructure investment and education reform issues.  In the mid-2000s, LaJeunesse was Chief of Staff to California Controller Steve Westly, the state’s chief financial officer. He also served as Chief of Staff to California Public Utilities Commissioner Susan Kennedy.  LaJeunesse began his career in Washington, D.C. as an assistant to United States Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell and later as a policy advisor to Senator Edward Kennedy.  LaJeunesse graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College and received his law degree with honors from Harvard Law School.

Nicholas Lemann began his journalism career as a writer for a New Orleans newspaper, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated from Harvard College, where he studied American history and literature. After graduation, he worked at The Washington Monthly, The Texas Monthly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. From 2003-2013, Lemann was dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. During this time, the Journalism School launched and completed its first capital fundraising campaign, added 20 members to its full-time faculty, built a student center and a digital media center, started two new professional degree programs, and launched new initiatives in investigative reporting, digital journalism, executive leadership for news organizations, and other areas. In 2013, returned to the Journalism School’s faculty. Lemann is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has published five books, most recently “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War” (2006). He has written for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate; and worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., “FRONTLINE,” the Discovery Channel, and the BBC. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.

Gregg has been an attorney with the Reporters Committee since 1994 and has served as the Legal Defense Director since 2000. He supervises the Committee’s amicus brief writing and journalism hotline services and is regularly interviewed by journalists on media law topics. He also serves as editor of the Reporters Committee’s news publications and guides. Gregg has served as a member of the American Bar Association’s Fair Trial and Free Press Task Force, as chairman of the D.C. Bar’s Media Law Committee, and as a member of the bar’s Arts, Entertainment, Media and Sports Law Section. Before and during law school, he worked as a journalist and research director for a Washington business and political magazine.

Professor Laura E. Little serves as the James G. Schmidt Chair in Law. She specializes in federal courts, conflict of laws, and constitutional law. She teaches, lectures, and consults internationally on these subjects and is routinely engaged for training judges as well as for speeches at academic and judicial conferences. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including a sole-authored casebook, Conflict of Laws  (2d ed. Aspen Wolters Kluwer 2018), two treatises: Federal Courts and First Amendment, both in Aspen Wolter Kluwer Publishing’s Examples and Explanations series, and Guilty Pleasures: Law and Comedy in America (Oxford 2019). Among her many awards for teaching and scholarship are several law school awards, a University-wide Lindback award, and Temple’s highest award for teaching, the University Great Teacher Award. The American Law Institute appointed Professor Little in 2014 to serve as Associate Reporter, Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws. Before entering academia, Professor Little practiced law in Philadelphia, litigating commercial cases and representing the print media in First Amendment cases. Prior to her law practice, Professor Little served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Supreme Court of the United States (October Term 1986) and Judge James Hunter III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (1985-1986).

Rebecca MacKinnon directs the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America, evaluating tech companies on their respect for users’ free expression and privacy. MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices and author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom. She was a founding Board member of the Global Network Initiative and is currently on the Board of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Bureau Chief and correspondent in China and Japan between 1998-2004.  More recently, she has taught at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and is a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communication Studies. She has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein and Berkman Centers, the Open Society Foundations, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and the New America Foundation. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. She lives in Washington DC.

Duncan McCargo is Visiting Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, Professor of Political Science at the University of Leeds, and a Senior Research Affiliate at Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He teaches alternate semesters at Columbia and Leeds. His books include Politics and the Press in Thailand (Routledge 2000), Media and Politics in Pacific Asia (Routledge 2003), The Thaksinization of Thailand (co-authored, NIAS 2005), Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008) (which won the inaugural 2009 Bernard Schwartz Book Prize from the Asia Society), and most recently Mapping National Anxieties: Thailand’s Southern Conflict (NIAS 2012). McCargo held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2011-14) to work on politics and justice in Thailand, in the course of which he attended a number of important freedom of expression trials. He is now completing a book on these issues for Cornell University Press.

Dr. Tarlach McGonagle is a senior researcher/lecturer at the Institute for Information Law (IViR). He is Coordinator of the specialised masters programme, Informatierecht; coordinates and lectures on a number of the programme’s compulsory and elective modules and is the programme’s dissertations coordinator.

He specialises in a broad range of topics relating to international and European human rights law, especially the rights to freedom of expression and religion; minority rights; participatory rights, and cultural and linguistic rights. His other main area of expertise is international, European and comparative media law and policy. Themes such as pluralism, diversity, tolerance and “hate speech” have a central place in his research.

Dr. McGonagle was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Amsterdam (2008) for his thesis examining the interface between freedom of expression and minority rights under international law. He also holds an LL.M. degree in International Human Rights Law (University of Essex, 2001) and a B.A. International in Law and French (National University of Ireland, Galway, 1998).

He regularly writes expert reports for various branches of the Council of Europe, OSCE and other IGOs and NGOs. He is a member and Rapporteur of the Council of Europe’s Committee of experts on protection of journalism and safety of journalists (MSI-JO). He was an invited expert speaker at the Thematic Discussion on “Racist Hate Speech” organised by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2012. In Spring 2013, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS), Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Fellow at the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law (RIIPL), Rutgers School of Law – Camden, New Jersey.

He is an associate member of the (Netherlands) School of Human Rights Research. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the European Audiovisual Observatory.

Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of Justitia, a think tank focusing on human rights and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Global Freedom of Expression. He has commented extensively on free speech and human rights in outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. Jacob has published in academic and peer-reviewed journals, including Human Rights Quarterly, Policy Review and Amnesty International’s Strategic Studies. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning book, MEN Ytringsfrihedens Historie i Danmark (BUT: The History of Freedom of Expression in Denmark). He is the author and presenter of the short documentary “Collision: Free speech and religion” (2013). Mr. Mchangama is a 2016 Marshall Memorial Fellow. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work on free speech and human rights.

Andrew McLaughlin is head of content & new business initiatives at Medium, leading its NYC office. He serves as chairman of the board of Access Now, and on the boards of Public Knowledge, the Sunlight Foundation, Digg, and Chartbeat.  He is a Future Tense fellow at the New America Foundation, an advisor to Data & Society, and to the Open Technology Fund.  He has previously worked as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. under President Obama, head of global public policy for Google, and chief policy officer for ICANN, and has taught at the Stanford and Harvard law schools.

Dario Milo is a partner in the Dispute Resolution Practice at Webber Wentzel, where he leads a team on communications and information law. Dario obtained BComm, LLB and LLM degrees in Company Law and Constitutional Law from the University of the Witwatersrand. After working as an associate in the Media Law Department, Dario studied for an LLM degree in Communications Law at University College London. Thereafter, he received a PhD at University College London. His thesis examined privacy, reputation and freedom of the media in the context of the law of defamation and privacy, focusing on South African, English and US law.

Dario is also qualified as a solicitor of the High Court of England and Wales, and taught Media and Entertainment Law at University College London and BPP Professional Education plc. Dario teaches media law, access to information law, and privacy law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he is a visiting associate professor. He is the author of Defamation and Freedom of Speech, and co-author of the forthcoming book, A Practical Guide to Media Law. Dario and his team had been commissioned to write a guide on the Protection of Personal Information Bill when it became law.

Heba Morayef is the MENA Regional Director at Amnesty International, Formerly, she was the Egypt Director at Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading non-profit organizations for defending and protecting against human rights violations. She produces reports, news releases and op-eds based on her findings and conducts local and international advocacy. Before joining Human Rights Watch, Morayef worked at Amnesty International’s international secretariat in London as campaigner on Libya and Tunisia. She speaks English, Arabic, and French. In a Spring 2013 poll conducted by TIME magazine, 88% of readers counted Morayef among the 100 most influential people on the planet for her work in Egypt.

Peter Noorlander is a consultant to NGOs and other organisations on issues of social justice law and policy, civil society empowerment and organisational development. Previously, he was chief executive of the Media Legal Defence Initiative, an organisation that provides legal aid to independent media and journalists and fights strategic litigation to enforce respect for media freedom. Peter is a lawyer who has specialised in the fields of media law and human rights. He has litigated at various national and international courts, including the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee, and has won standard-setting cases on issues ranging from licensing of media to excessive defamation awards. Prior to joining the Media Legal Defence Initiative, he was Senior Legal Advisor for the Open Society Foundations’ Media Program, and from 2001-2007 he served as legal officer and then senior legal officer at ARTICLE 19, the global freedom of expression organisation.

Suzanne Nossel was named Executive Director of the PEN American Center in 2013. Prior to PEN she served as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. Her work led to passage of the Afghan Women and Girls Security and Promotion Act (2012), and drew attention to the chilling climate for free expression in Russia through the case of imprisoned punk band Pussy Riot. Before Amnesty, Suzanne served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations at the U.S. Department of State. She played a leading role in U.S. engagement at the U.N. Human Rights Council. She was also Chief Operating Officer for Human Rights Watch. Suzanne has worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the implementation of South Africa’s National Peace Accord (early 1990s), and has done election monitoring and human rights documentation in Bosnia and Kosovo. Suzanne has served as vice-president of U.S. Business Development at Bertelsmann Media Worldwide, vice-president of strategy and operations for the Wall Street Journal, and a consultant at McKinsey & Company. She is the author of Presumed Equal: What America’s Top Women Lawyers Really Think About Their Firms. Suzanne contributes to and comments on human rights issues for news outlets including CNN and NPR.

Karuna Nundy is a Senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India, and international human rights lawyer. She represents and acts as legal policy adviser to governments, United Nations, companies and civil society movements. She is arguing as unconstitutional restrictions on online speech before the Supreme Court of India. Her pro bono practice includes also, the Supreme Court litigation from the 1984 gas disaster and toxic waste dumps in Bhopal. She has argued cases involving the rights of alleged terrorists, mentally ill people and class actions on sexual harassment. Karuna’s advisory and policy work includes contributions to the Nepal Interim Constitution; a legislation workshop with the Senate of Pakistan; advice to the Government of Bhutan on compliance with human rights treaties; and legal reform in the Maldives with the Attorney General’s Office and the Chief Justice of the Maldives Supreme Court. In India, she drafted contributions to the new “anti-rape” laws and the Right to Food Act. Karuna has an Economics degree (St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University), a law degree (University of Cambridge), and an LL.M. (Columbia Law School). She is qualified to practice in India and NY. She is interviewed and comments on free speech, gender and legal issues on the BBC, India Today, the New York Times, NPR, FAZ, NDTV and other media.

Korea University Law School Professor PARK Kyung-Sin, a.k.a. K.S. Park, one of the founders of Open Net Korea, and has written academically and been active in internet, free speech, privacy, defamation, copyright, international contracting, etc. (quoted in Freedom House report, New York Times)   He has given expert testimonies in high-profile free speech and privacy cases concerning Minerva, the internet real name verification law, the military’s seditious book blacklisting, the newspaper consumers’ boycott, and Park Jung-Geun the one jailed for retweeting North Korean government twits.  As a result, the “false news” crime in the Minerva case and the internet real name verification laws were struck down as unconstitutional, Park Jung-Geun and Minerva were acquitted, the soldiers challenging book blacklisting were reinstated, the newspaper boycotters’ judgment acquitted the “secondary boycotting” charge (2010-2013)).

Since 2006, he also has served as the executive director of the PSPD Law Center, a non-profit entity that has organized several impact litigations, including some of the above cases, in the areas of free speech, privacy, and copyright. There, the Law Center won the world’s first damage lawsuit against a copyright holder for “bad faith” takedown (2009).  On privacy, the Law Center won the world’s first damage lawsuit against a major portal for warrantless disclosure of the user identity data to the police (2012).  As a result of this judgment, all major portals stopped complying with such data requests by the government. As to the three major telcos that have continued to comply with user identity data requests, the Law Center won another suit in 2015 forcing them to inform the user on whether such data release has taken place on him or not.  The Law Center also filed a suit against the Korean Prosecutor’s Office for failing to notify an e-mail user of the fact of seizure of his emails and won a damages award (2013).)

In 2008, He also founded the Clinical Legal Education Center of Korea University School of Law (f.k.a. Global Legal Clinic) which in 2009 through 2010 successfully carried on a successful campaign to enter Korea into the Supplementary Fund in the wake of one of the largest oil spill ever.  In 2011, in the spirit of solidity of www.chillingeffects.org, he and his former clinic students founded www.internetlawclinic.org with law students, where people and cultural producers alike can obtain free legal advices in the areas of copyright, trademarks, publicity rights, defamation, privacy, etc.

Since 2002, he has served as a legal advisor to Korea Film Council and the Ministry of Culture, representing the country in negotiations concerning the UNESCO Cultural Diversity Convention and the country’s first ever film co-production treaty with France.  He has represented many film producers in their international distribution, co-production, and development deals, and has authored a world-wide survey of tax incentives for film production.

In 2009, he served as a member of the National Media Council, an advisory body to the National Assembly set up to examine the historic bills allowing media cross-ownership, among other things.  While sitting on the council, he has spearheaded an effort to oppose a new bill creating a new crime of “cyber-insult”.

Until, he has been a commissioner of the Korean Communication Standards Commission, a governmental entity censoring broadcasting and internet contents, where he has given many dissenting opinions.

An alumnus of Harvard University (Class of ’92, Physics) and UCLA Law School (Class of ’95), licensed in California and Washington State, he represented immigrant workers in restaurant, garment, and janitorial industry.  He has filed or defended, and won major lawsuits against brand-name garment manufacturers and large department stores (1995-1997, Los Angeles) and has also participated in the historic civil rights class action against the local Metropolitan Transit Authority.

He is also the founding editor (2007) and the Editor in Chief of Korea University Law Review, available on Westlaw.

His academic articles (Korean with English abstracts) on the relevant areas can be found here: http://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/po/citationindex/poCretDetail.kci?citationBean.cretId=CRT000887263&citationBean.artiId=ART001413212

His shorter writings can be found here. http://opennetkorea.org/en/wp/category/openblog

Sejal Parmar is an international human rights scholar and practitioner whose expertise and research interests lie broadly in the field of freedom of expression. She is currently a Lecturer in Law and the Director of the Human Rights Forum at the School of Law and Fellow at the Centre for Media Freedom at the University of Sheffield. She is also a Visiting Professor and Fellow at the Center on Media, Data and Society at the Central European University in Vienna, where was previously a tenured Assistant Professor of Law. Parmar previously worked as Senior Adviser to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Representative on Freedom of the Media and as Senior Legal Officer at ARTICLE 19.

Alongside her academic work, Parmar regularly acts as a consultant for a range of intergovernmental, non-governmental and private sector organisations. She has worked as a consultant for the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (to develop the UN Strategy and Action Plan on Hate Speech: Detailed Guidance on implementation for UN field presences and the Guidance Note on Addressing and Countering COVID-19 Related Hate Speech) and serves as a Co-Rapporteur of the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Combating Hate Speech. She is a member of the academic constituency of the Global Network Initiative, a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre, and an Advisory Board Member of Rights for Peace.

Parmar has published broadly in the field of international human rights law and is currently writing a monograph on Freedom of Expression Under Pressure under contract with Cambridge University Press. She is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Human Rights.

Darian Pavli is senior attorney on freedom of information and expression issues with the Open Society Justice Initiative. Based in the New York office, he has been involved, among other things, with impact litigation before international human rights mechanisms, and has played a leading role in efforts to establish the right of access to government information as a basic human right internationally. Pavli works closely with human rights groups in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere to address a broad range of freedom of expression and information deficits, and writes and speaks extensively on these issues. Prior to joining the Open Society Justice Initiative, Pavli was the Southern Balkans researcher for Human Rights Watch and a senior attorney for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Mission in Albania. He taught constitutional law in his native Albania, and holds advanced law degrees from NYU Law School and Central European University.

Dinah PoKempner guides Human Rights Watch in the development of its positions on international law and policy. She researches and writes on international humanitarian law, cyber-liberties, hate speech, freedom of expression and research ethics, among other topics. Dinah’s field work has taken her to Cambodia, the Republic of Korea, Vietnam and former Yugoslavia; she has lectured and taught international law and human rights classes at many major universities and testified to the U.S. Congress on encryption policy. She has also worked for the Office of the Legal Advisor of the U.S. Department of State. She became involved with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group in 1997, and she has been engaged in the organization’s mission since then. As a member of the Advisory Board, she helps the organization in decision-making, as well in legal and logistical matters. Dinah is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law.

David G. Post recently retired from his position as I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at Temple University, where he taught intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace.  Post is the author of In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford), a Jeffersonian view of Internet law and policy, awarded the 2009 Green Bag Legal Writing Award and variously described as “beautifully written” and “astonishing” (Lawrence Lessig), “brilliant and a joy to read” (Jonathan Zittrain), and “an authentic work of genius, conceived and written in the finest Jeffersonian spirit” (Sean Wilentz). In addition, he is the (co)-author of Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age (West), and has published numerous scholarly articles on intellectual property, the law of cyberspace, and complexity theory (including Law and Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace, the 2nd most-frequently-cited law review article of all time in the field of intellectual property). He is a regular contributor to the influential legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy.

Monroe E. Price is the director of the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Joseph and Sadie Danciger Professor of Law and Director of the Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society at the Cardozo School of Law where he served as Dean from 1982 to 1991. Professor Price is also an Adjunct Full Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School and directs the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research in London, and is the Chair of the Center for Media and Communication Studies of the Central European University in Budapest. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale, where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Associate Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court and was an assistant to Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz. Professor Price was founding director of the Program in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was deputy director of California Indian Legal Services, one of the founders of the Native American Rights Fund, and author of Law and the American Indian. Among his many books are Media and Sovereignty; Television, The Public Sphere and National Identity; Routledge Handbook of Media Law; and Free Expression, Globalism, and the New Strategic Communication.

Sara Rafsky is Americas Research Associate for the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she reports on press freedom in the region. She has written special reports for CPJ on Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras and provided research for the organization’s first ever special report on the United States: “The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America.” Previously, she wrote about culture and politics as a freelance journalist in New York, South America and South East Asia. Rafsky also lived in Argentina, where she worked with the Ford Foundation and interned with Human Rights Watch and the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE). In 2008, she received a Fulbright Grant to research photojournalism and the Colombian armed conflict. She has a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University.

Darío has experience in the areas of international human rights law, public international law, media law and journalism, refugees and women’s rights. Before joining ARTICLE 19, Darío was Deputy General Director of the Unit for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights at Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior. Prior to this, he worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Darío holds a bachelor degree in international relations and an LLM in public international law from the University of Amsterdam.

Andrey Rikhter (Andrei Richter) is Researcher Professor at Comenius University in Bratislava and Adjunct Professor of the Webster University in Vienna.

In 2011-22 he served as Director and a Senior Adviser at the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.

An Austrian citizen, Richter holds university degrees in law, journalism and foreign languages, a doctorate of philology in Russia and a habilitated professorship in media studies from Slovakia.

He has authored more than 250 publications on media law and policy in Russian, English, Armenian, Azeri, Bosnian, Croat, German, French, Serbian, Slovak, Tajik and Ukrainian, including the standard media law textbook for journalism students in the Russian Federation (2002, 2009, 2016), a textbook on international standards of media regulation (2011), a textbook on online media law (2014), and a book on censorship and freedom of the media in post-Soviet countries, published by UNESCO (2007). Dr Richter sits on the editorial boards of a number of international journals on communications and the media.

Andrei Richter was a long-time professor at the School of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he chaired a department in media law and history. He founded and led Moscow Media Law and Policy Center, a Russian NGO in 1990-2010s.

He also served as a commissioner at the International Commission of Jurists and the Chair of the Law Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.

Mr. Romel Regalado Bagares is Executive Director of the Center for International Law, a Philippine-based NGO engaged in advocacy, training and strategic litigation for free expression. As a lawyer, he has been assisting journalists, human rights defenders, social media activists and users in free expression cases in various Philippines courts and tribunals and before UN human rights mechanisms. Most recently, he took part as lawyer and petitioner in the constitutional challenge against the Philippine Anti-Cyber Crime Law (the Alexander Adonis Petition). He also recently assisted a jailed Thai blogger and poet challenge his imprisonment under Thailand’s repressive lese majeste laws before the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Mr. Bagares, who is senior associate at the Roque & Butuyan Law Offices in Manila, also lectures in public international law at the Lyceum Philippines University College of Law.

Lee Rowland is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. Lee has extensive experience as a litigator, lobbyist, and public speaker. She serves as lead counsel in federal First Amendment cases involving public employee speech rights, illegal arrest for reading protected material, and state secrecy surrounding the lethal injection process. She also authors amicus briefs and blogs on topics including the intersection of speech and privacy (e.g., restrictions on mug shots and nudity; the right to be forgotten, copyright injunctions), student and public employee speech, obscenity, and the Communications Decency Act. Lee serves as an Adjunct Clinical Professor for NYU Law’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic, and is a member of the New York Bar Association’s Communications and Media Law Committee. Prior to joining the ACLU, Lee was a voting rights counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice; she previously ran the Reno office of the ACLU of Nevada, where she regularly argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Nevada Supreme Court. Lee is a graduate of Middlebury College and Harvard Law School, where she served as President of the Harvard Defenders and staffed the Harvard Human Rights Journal and the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal.

Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a lecturer who teaches on global media, innovation and human rights. She writes on journalism and development, investigative reporting in the global south and has published extensively over the last decade on the media in Africa. More recently she has become focused on solutions to the problem of online disinformation, earning her PHD on the topic from the University of Navarra. She is the editor of Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Reporting from Around the World (New Press, 2014) and African Muckraking: 75 years of Investigative journalism from Africa (Jakana 2017). She is the editor of the forthcoming Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms and Governments Control the News (Columbia University Press 2020)

Fatou Jagne Senghor has more than 10 years of experience working on human rights and freedom of expression around Africa. She is based in Senegal, worked and lived in France, Gambia, UK and South Africa. She joined ARTICLE 19 in February 2002 and worked in the Africa office in Johannesburg, South Africa until 2004. She is currently based in Senegal where she established and heads ARTICLE19 West Africa regional office in 2010. She works with governments, African intergovernmental bodies and NGOs on media law/ policies and freedom of expression issues in Africa, conducting investigative missions, conducting national and regional training, advocacy, litigate on behalf of victims of human rights violations and writes on human rights and Freedom of expression in Africa. Fatou coordinated the advocacy work for the adoption of the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in African by the African Commission on Human Rights in 2002 and has spearheaded the development of the framework for the establishment of the mechanisms of a Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression in Africa (2005). She also chaired the Working group on access to information in African (2011 to 2013). She led the coordination and drafting of many NGOs recommendations and resolutions before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. She was programme adviser on the reform of the National Media Commission of Ghana (from August 2012 to January 2014).

Sanjay Sethi is the co-Executive Director and co-founder of Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI), overseeing coordination of its advocacy programs and legal services in Europe and the United States. As Director, Mr. Sethi spearheaded AFI’s relocation program for global at-risk artists and initiated the first country-by-country human rights report series focusing on freedom of artistic expression. He recently initiated AFI’s strategic litigation program, designed to challenge restrictions to creative freedom before the European Court of Human Rights and EU Court of Justice.

Since 2010, Mr. Sethi has also served as the managing partner of Sethi & Mazaheri, LLC, dedicating his legal practice to immigration, asylum, and art law. In 2021, the firm was awarded New York State pro bono law firm of the year. He is admitted to practice law in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC and the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Sethi is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Supervising Attorney for University of California, Berkeley School of Law Arts and Innovation Representation program. He received his BA in economics and international studies from Northwestern University, MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and JD from University of Miami School of Law. Mr. Sethi also holds certificates in Art and Cultural Heritage Law from Georgetown University Law Center and non-profit management from Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy.

Steven Shapiro served as the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1993-2016. He currently teaches courses on civil liberties and civil rights at Columbia Law School and the NYU School of Law. He has also taught in recent years at Stanford Law School and Sciences Po in Paris. In addition, he is a member of the Policy Committee of Human Rights Watch and a former Board member of Human Rights First. Throughout his career, Shapiro has written and lectured extensively on a broad range of issues, including free expression.

Bruce Shapiro is Senior Executive Director for Professional Programs for the Journalism School at Columbia University, and Executive Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, encouraging innovative reporting on violence, conflict and tragedy worldwide. An award winning reporter on human rights, politics, and media ethics, Shapiro is a Contributing Editor at The Nation and longtime U.S. Correspondent for Late Night Live on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. His books include Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Reporting in America and Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future (co-authored with Rev. Jesse Jackson).

Since 1993, Olga Sidorovich has led an independent Moscow-based policy development, research, and educational organization in the field of constitutionalism and law. The Institute of Law and Public Policy (before 2001 – Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern and Central Europe), seeks to promote liberal and democratic values and the principles of the rule of law, pluralistic democracy, and full equality of individuals. Under Sidorovich’s leadership in 2007, the Institute became a winner of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. For nearly two decades she has served as the editor-in-chief of the Russian legal and political journal Comparative Constitutional Review. In 1998 Sidorovich obtained an MA in business administration in the public sector from the School of Public Policy, University of Birmingham. Between 1982 and 1992, she worked as a research fellow at the Institute for USA and Canadian Studies, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as the Institute of Europe

Joel Simon is director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York . He is also a former consultant for Global Freedom of Expression, fellow for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and a senior visiting fellow at Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute. For over 15 years, he served as the executive director for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).  Simon led the CPJ through a period of expansion. Under his guidance, CPJ launched the Global Campaign Against Impunity, established a Journalist Assistance program and spearheaded CPJ’s efforts to defend press freedom in the digital space. CPJ has also been honored with the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights and a News & Documentary Emmy for its work in defense of press freedom. Simon has written on press freedom issues for publications including Columbia Journalism Review, World Policy Journal, Asahi Shimbun, and The Times of India. His press freedom analysis is featured regularly in major media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and BBC. Before becoming executive director of CPJ, Simon served as the Americas program coordinator and then deputy director. As a journalist in Latin America, Simon covered the Guatemalan civil war, the Zapatista uprising in Southern Mexico, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the economic turmoil in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A graduate of Amherst College and Stanford University, he is the author of Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge.

Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the political science department and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his books include Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times (Princeton University Press, forthcoming); Human Rights Futures (co-edited with Stephen Hopgood and Leslie Vinjamuri, Cambridge University Press, 2017); Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance (co-editor with Alexander Cooley, Cambridge University Press, 2015); From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (Norton Books, 2000); Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Cornell University Press, 1991). Recent articles include “The First Amendment Is Not a Suicide Pact,” American Purpose, February 22, 2021, https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-first-amendment-is-not-a-suicide-pact/; “The Broken Bargain: How Nationalism Came Back,” Foreign Affairs 98:2 (March/April 2019), 54-60; “Backlash against Human Rights Shaming: Emotions in Groups,” International Theory (first view online, December 2019, forthcoming in 2021);“Backlash against Naming and Shaming: The Politics of Status and Emotion,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22:4 (2020), symposium on “Backlash Politics”; “The Modernization Trap,” The Journal of Democracy, April 2017, examining populist nationalism.

Mark Stephens, CBE is a Senior Member at Howard Kennedy FSI specializing in international, appellate and complex litigation, constitutional, human rights, IP, media & regulatory work, defamation, privacy, media, art and cultural property, data protection and freedom of information, and international arbitration. Mark Stephens has undertaken some of the highest profile cases in England and abroad. Mark is also extremely active in many other areas having been appointed by the Foreign Secretary to the FCO Free Expression advisory board and the Lord Chancellor to be a Champion for the Community Legal Service. He has been retained by a number of Governments as an advisor and to represent their interests including, Republic of Cyprus, Jamaica. Libya, Mauritius, and the Russian Republic. Additionally, Mark has litigated in countries as diverse as Anguilla, Antigua, Australia, Cyprus, France, India, Iraq, Iran, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Samoa, Singapore, and the United States.

Director in the Norwegian National Institution for Human Rights. Former lawyer in Lawfirm Schjødt. Former lawyer for Norway’s General Counsel. Civil Affairs and former District Attorney. Vidar works as a litigator in several areas, specializing in Freedom of Speech. He is regularly representing various Norwegian media companies, The Association of editors-in-chief and various NGOs. He has represented Edward Snowden in a case on extradition against the Norwegian state, and litigated the “Rolfsen” case that was awarded Columbia’s prize for the best ruling on Freedom of Speech in 2016.

Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School; and a Visiting Fellow, London School of Economics.  She is the author of the landmark Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2000) and many articles and book chapters on international and comparative law, often focusing on political transitions.  In 2012, she published Humanity’s Law (OUP, 2012) setting out a paradigm shift in international affairs. Her latest book is Globalizing Transitional Justice (OUP 2014) which explores the last decade in the evolution of the field.  She also writes and tweets regularly for a broader audience @rutiteitel.  Prof. Teitel is founding co-chair of the American Society of International Law’s Interest Group on Transitional Justice and Rule of Law, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the Executive Committee of the International Studies Association Human Rights Section as well as on the ILA International Human Rights Committee.  Prof. Teitel is also on the Board of the London Review of International Law.  Last year, she was a Straus Fellow-in-Residence at New York University Law School’s Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice (2012-2013).

Salil Tripathi chairs the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International (2015-2021). From 2009-2013 he was co-chair of the Writers at Risk Committee at English PEN. Salil is an award-winning journalist and writer, born in Bombay, India. He has been a foreign correspondent in Singapore and Hong Kong and now lives in New York. He has been a foreign correspondent in Singapore and Hong Kong with Far Eastern Economic Review, and has written for newspapers around the world, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Foreign Policy, NYR Daily, New Statesman, Guardian, Independent. He is contributing editor at the Caravan (India) and a columnist at Mint. He is a Journalism Adviser at the Global Reporting Center (University of British Columbia), and a member of the UK executive committee of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (UK).

His awards include the Citibank Pan Asia Economic Journalism Award in 1994, the third prize at Bastiat Prize in 2011, and Red Ink Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2015. His books include Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009), The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy (Aleph, 2014 and Yale University Press, 2016), and Detours: Songs of the Open Road (Tranquebar, 2015). He is writing a book about Gujaratis.

In a parallel life, he is senior adviser, global issues, at the Institute for Human Rights and Business.

Françoise Tulkens has a Doctorate in Law, a Master’s degree in Criminology and a Higher education teaching certificate (agrégation de l’enseignement supérieur) in Law. She was a Professor at the University of Louvain (Belgium) and has taught, in Belgium as well as abroad – as a visiting professor at the Universities of Geneva, Leuven, Ottawa, Paris I, Rennes, Strasbourg and Louisiana State University –, in the fields of general criminal law, comparative and European criminal law, juvenile justice and human rights protection systems. From November 1998 to September 2012, she was a Judge in the European Court of Human Rights, serving as Section President from January 2007 and as Vice-President of the Court from February 2011. She has been an Associate Member of the Belgian Royal Academy since 2011. In September 2012, she took up an appointment as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Advisory Panel for Kosovo. Since June 2013 she is a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Union Fundamental Rights’ Agency (FRA). Françoise Tulkens is the author of many publications in the areas of human rights and criminal law and also co-author of reference books. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Geneva, Limoges, Ottawa, Ghent, Liège and Brighton.

Stephen I. Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law. His teaching and research focus on federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, and national security law. A nationally recognized expert on the role of the federal courts in the war on terrorism, Vladeck’s prolific and widely cited scholarship has appeared in an array of legal publications—including the Harvard Law Review and the Yale Law Journal — and his popular writing has been published in forums ranging from the New York Times to BuzzFeed. Vladeck, who is a co-editor of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks, frequently represents parties or amici in litigation challenging government counterterrorism policies, and has authored reports on related topics for a wide range of organizations—including the First Amendment Center, the Constitution Project, and the ABA’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security.

Professor Vladeck has won numerous awards for his teaching, his scholarship, and his service to the law school. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a senior editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy, co-editor in-chief of the Just Security blog, a senior contributor to the Lawfare blog, the Supreme Court Fellow at the Constitution Project, and a fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law.

A 2004 graduate of Yale Law School, Vladeck clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. While a law student, he was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal and the Student Director of the Balancing Civil Liberties & National Security Post-9/11 Litigation Project, and he was awarded the Potter Stewart Prize for Best Team Performance in Moot Court and the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for Outstanding Moot Court Oralist. He earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001, where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig’s Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present.” Vladeck’s wife, Karen, is a litigation associate at Arent Fox LLP.

Prof. dr. em. Dirk Voorhoof lectured European Media and Information Law at Ghent University and Copenhagen University and he reports on developments regarding freedom of expression, media and journalism in Europe. He is co-founder and member of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) and of Legal Human Academy, and he is a member of the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University and of CASE, the coalition against SLAPPs in Europe. From 2002-2007 he lectured at the University of Oxford, MLAP (Global Media Law Advocates Programme) and since 2017 he is a guest professor at Luxembourg University in the master programme on Space, Telecommunications and Media Law. He was a member of the Committee of Experts on Internet Intermediaries (MSI-NET) of the Council of Europe (2016-2018), he is active in the JUFREX-pool of experts (Council of Europe/EU, since 2017) and he is a member of Global FOE&I @Columbia experts network, since 2014. He is the co-author of the free online e-book Freedom of Expression, the Media and Journalists: Case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (updated ed. 2021, published by the European Audiovisual Observatory). He recently published : ‘Same standards, different tools? The ECtHR and the protection and limitations of freedom of expression in the digital environment’, in Michael O’Boyle (ed.), Human Rights Challenges in the Digital Age : Judicial Perspectives, Strasbourg, Council of Europe Publications, 2020, 11-46.

Dr Ben Wagner is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft, where his research focuses on technology policy, human rights and accountable information systems. He is Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and a visiting researcher at the Human Centred Computing Group, University of Oxford. He previously worked at WU Vienna, TU-Berlin, the University of Pennsylvania and European University Viadrina. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from European University Institute in Florence.

Doreen Weisenhaus is a Senior Lecturer with a joint appointment at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law and the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing, where she also serves as Director of the Media Law and Policy Initiative. Her courses include Global Freedom of Expression and the Press (Pritzker), The Journalist Abroad: Legal Risks and Dilemmas (Medill), and Media Law and Government Transparency Practicum (a joint law-journalism offering). Prior to Northwestern, she taught media law and ethics at the University of Hong Kong (2000-2017), where she remains an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre. Before HKU, she was City Editor of The New York Times and the first legal editor of The New York Times Magazine before becoming its law and politics editor.

She was also editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal, a leading publication for lawyers in the U.S. that won several major journalism awards during her tenure; a prosecutor in New York City; a television news producer in Chicago, and a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. She holds a JD from Northwestern’s law school and a BS in journalism from Medill, also at Northwestern.

Her research interests include international press freedom and global trends in media law and policy. She is the author of Hong Kong Media Law: A Guide for Journalists and Media Professionals (Hong Kong University Press 2007) and an expanded second edition in 2014. She is lead editor and co-author of Media Law and Policy in the Internet Age (Hart Publishing Oxford 2017) that documents and analyzes media law reform trends worldwide. She has contributed to a number of publications, including the International Encyclopedia of Communication (Communication Law and Policy: Asia) and the International Libel and Privacy Handbook.

Sara Whyatt is a campaigner and researcher on freedom of artistic expression and human rights, notably as director of PEN International ‘s freedom of expression program for over 20 years and previously at Amnesty International’s Asia Research Department. At PEN she worked with its global membership mobilising its campaigns for writers at risk as well as on other issues affecting freedom of expression including anti-terror legislation, criminal defamation laws, actions by non-state entities, among others.  In 2013 she took up freelance consultancy, working on projects among them for UNESCO, Freemuse, Culture Action Europe, PEN International, and the International Freedom of Expression Exchange.  In 2019 she was selected onto UNESCO’s Expert Facility advising on its 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. She is also the author of the chapter on freedom of artistic expression in the Convention’s 2015 and 2018 Global Reports and has developed training programs for governments and CSOs on monitoring and reporting strategies on artistic freedom.

Can Yeginsu is a barrister practising from 3 Verulam Buildings where he has been consistently recognised as one of the U.K.’s leading lawyers practising in civil liberties and human rights, administrative and public law, and international law. Mr. Yeginsu has appeared in numerous cases as counsel representing journalists, as well as free speech and media organisations, before a range of courts and tribunals, including the English Court of Appeal, the U.K. Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the ECOWAS Court of Justice. He is also Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School (New York), where he co-teaches a seminar on freedom of expression and is Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown Law (Washington D.C.) and Koç University Law School (Istanbul), where he teaches international law.

Kyu Ho Youm, the Jonathan Marshall First Amendment Chair professor at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, has published extensively about freedom of expression and information since the mid-1980s. His law journal articles have been cited by American and foreign courts, including the U.K. House of Lords, the Australian High Court, and the Canadian Supreme Court. Human rights lawyers have used his research in representing their clients in press freedom litigation in the U.S. and abroad. Youm has prepared a freedom of information (FOI) report for Open Society Justice Initiative’s The Right to Information: Good Law and Practice and the case briefing on freedom of speech and the press for ARTICLE 19. He has contributed to Media Law and Ethics (5th forthcoming), International Libel & Privacy Handbook (2013), and Media, Advertising &, Entertainment Law Throughout the World (2014). A native of South Korea, Youm is currently working on the Korean media law book for the International Encyclopaedia of Laws (IEL) project. He is the Communication Law and Media Policy editor of the 12-volume International Encyclopedia of Communication. He holds graduate degrees in journalism and law from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Yale, and Oxford.

Jennifer is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Groningen NL working on the Humour in Court project (NWO Vidi 2022-2027). She holds a PhD (Law) from the University of East Anglia and is an active member of Forhum.org.

Her research interests lie in the area of freedom of expression and humour, with a focus on broadcast regulation and political satire. This stems from her background working for over twenty years in broadcast television as a Senior Editorial Advisor at the BBC, UKTV and as Editorial Compliance Manager for Playout services in the UK. At the BBC she specialised in comedy regulation and at UKTV language editorial policy. She has worked as a consultant for numerous broadcasters and independent production companies. Her PhD thesis examined the chilling effect that regulation has on writers and producers of broadcast comedy.

She was part of a working party presenting to the UN Human Rights Committee on the Right of Peaceful Assembly in Online Spaces The Right of Peaceful Assembly in Online Spaces: A Comment on the Revised Draft General Comment No. 37 on Article 21 (Right of Peaceful Assembly) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and has co-authored two further publications on freedom of expression, Laughing Matters: Humor, Free Speech and Hate Speech at the European Court of Human Rights (by Alberto Godioli, Jennifer Young and Matteo Fiori) and the special collection paper Humor and Free Speech: A Comparative Analysis of Global Case Law with Alberto Godioli for Global Freedom of Expression.