Alejandra Ancheita

Alejandra Ancheita is Board member and Staff attorney of the Project on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ProDESC), a human rights organization based in Mexico City. She has worked for over a decade as a human rights advocate in Mexico, and was 2005 a participant in the Human Rights Advocates Training Program at Columbia University. Upon her return, she founded ProDESC, where she was the Executive Director until December 2008. In her years at ProDESC, and as a litigation specialist at the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center (Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juarez, Centro Pro) and the Center for Labor Support and Reflection (Centro de Reflexión y Apoyo Laboral, CEREAL), Alejandra worked on strategic litigation and defense of human rights advocates and local communities. Alejandra returned to ProDESC in the fall of 2010, where she currently heads the Transnational Justice Area of the organization, in addition to consulting for other organizations in Mexico.

Theo van Boven is Honorary Professor of International Law at the International & European Law Department at the Maastricht University. From December 2001 to December 2004 UN Special Rapporteur against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Earlier he served as Director of Human Rights of the United Nations and was a member of the United Nations Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and of the Committee on the Elimination of Racism and Discrimination. He was also the first Registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He was the Head of the Netherlands delegation to the United Nations Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (Rome, 1998). He was President of the Netherlands Association of International Law; Member of the International Commission of Jurists; and a member of the Board of the International Movement against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism. His honours include: Recipient of the Louise Weiss Prize (Strasbourg, 1982), the Right Livelihood Honorary Award (Stockholm, 1985), and the Carnegie Wateler Peace Prize (The Hague, 2004). He has written extensively on international human rights and humanitarian law.

Reed Brody is Counsel and Spokesperson for Human Rights Watch in Brussels. He is author of three HRW reports on the U.S. mistreatment of prisoners in the “war on terror.” His work on the prosecutions of Chilean general Augusto Pinochet and the former dictator of Chad, Hissène Habré, is featured in the new documentary film “The Dictator Hunter.” Before HRW, he led United Nations teams investigating massacres in the Democratic Republic of Congo and monitoring human rights in El Salvador. He helped to prosecute human rights crimes in Haiti. In his 1984 published book he uncovered the crimes by the U.S.-backed “contras” against Nicaraguan civilians. For more information see: www.reedbrody.org

Colin Gonsalves

Upon attaining his law degree in 1983, Colin Gonsalves co-founded the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) and developed it into a national organization that brought together over 200 lawyers and paralegals operating out of 28 offices spread throughout India. He has brought numerous precedent-setting cases to the Supreme Court and the appellate-level High Courts of various states. Amongst these cases was the infamously labeled “Right to Food” case, which involved one of the greatest expansions of Constitutional rights seen by the Indian society in the last several decades. Mr. Gonsalves has written, edited and co-edited copious number of articles and books on a range of human rights law issues. For such inspiring work, he was presented with the “International Human Rights Award” by the American Bar Association in 2005. Most recently, in 2010, he has been conferred a Doctorate of the University, honoris causa, by the University of Middlesex, UK. He was also given the “Mother Teresa Memorial Award” for Social Justice “in recognition of remarkable contribution in legal services addressing human rights” in 2010.

Florian Jeßberger is Professor of Law at the University of Hamburg where he holds the Chair in Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, International Criminal Law and Contemporary Legal History. Previously he was the Lichtenberg-Professor of International and Comparative Criminal Law at Humboldt-University in Berlin. He has been a visiting scholar and lecturer inter alia at the University of California in Berkeley (USA), the University of Naples (Italy), the University of Western Cape in Cape Town (South Africa) and the China University of Political Sciences and Law in Beijing (China). He is a co-editor of the Journal of International Criminal Justice and the Oxford Companion to International Criminal Law & Justice and has published many articles on various aspects of international and comparative criminal law.

Manfred Nowak is Professor for International Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Co-Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). From 2004 to 2010 he was the UN-Special Rapporteur on Torture. In this function he published a critical report on the US-detention camp Guantánamo, in which he accused the United States of America of violating international Human Rights standards. Manfred Nowak is head of an independent Human Rights Commission at the Austrian Ministry of Interior and, since 2010, Vice-President of the Austrian UNESCO-Commission. He has also been a member of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) since 1995.

Annemie Schaus is Professor for International and Public Law at the Centre for Public Law (Centre de droit public) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Schaus' PHD dealt with the topic "L'Exécution des obligations internationales dans l'Etat fédéral". She published numerous books on public, european and international law.

Peter Weiss is one of the most recognized and innovative human rights lawyers worldwide, Vice President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, with which he has been associated for forty years. He was a practicing lawyer in the US and is Vice President of the International League for Human Rights, FIDH (La Fédération Internationale des Droits de l'Homme). He has long been involved with the campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons and is President of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and Vice President and former President of IALANA (International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms). He is a member of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now, which advocates a just peace for both sides in the Middle East. In the past he has been President of the American Committee on Africa and Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.