New Tactics | Election Monitoring featured resource practitioners

Election Monitoring featured resource practitioners

Below you will find the Election Monitoring featured resource practitioners for the January 2009 online dialogue. If you would like to contact one of these practitioners, please click on their name (hyperlink). This will bring you to their New Tactics account biography, where you can click on the 'contact' tab to send a message to their email.

Eka Ekaterine Siradze-Delaunay is the executive director of ISFED (International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy), a leading Georgian NGO that focuses on election monitoring and democracy promotion. ISFED played a central role in monitoring and evaluating the results of the recent Georgian Parliamentary elections in May 2008 and Presidential elections in February. She has an extensive background working as an election observer, both in Georgia and abroad, including as a long-term election observer during the Moldova elections in the summer of 2007. The organization has is supported by NDI, NED, EU, CoE, Eurasia Foundation and the OSCE to implement programs on election monitoring, auditing voters’ lists, conducting Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) community development and local self-governance in Georgia. Ms. Siradze-Delaunay received her undergraduate degree in Law from the Technical University of Georgia in 1998 and obtained an MA in Crisis Analysis and Prevention from the University of Pantheon Sorbonne, Paris 1 in 2004. Ms. Siradze-Delaunay is also one of the first recipients of the Bill Maynes Fellowship, a program run by Eurasia Foundation.

Michael Michael Meadowcroft has spent all his adult life in politics, both within the party organisation and as a public representative, including as a UK Member of Parliament. He has also experience as a Chief Executive of large NGOs.
Over the past twenty years he has led or been a member of forty-eight missions to thirty-five different countries. He has extensive media experience.

Evans Wafula is working independently as Human Rights and Media Development Consultant. Evans worked previously as Director of Africa Interactive in Eastern Africa and coordinated the Voices of Africa project which encourages African journalists to use mobile phones to promote human rights and democracy. Evans Wafula has been practicing journalism since 1998. He has other specialty in other fields; including human rights training. He has worked for various media organizations including the West Africa Magazine, Central Africa Journal, Eastern Africa Magazine, Business Week, and the London based Africa Week magazine. Besides, Wafula has previously served as board members for the Foreign
Correspondent Association of East Africa (FCEA)-a media organization that represents the interests of foreign journalists and correspondents working in East Africa region and he is the co-founder of the Africa Journalists Commission on Human Rights (CHARJ)-A media organizations that champions press freedom in Africa.

He edited the first-ever non-profit human rights journal in Kenya, which reports on Kenya’s human rights situation. Dubbed: The Rights Journal published by the Independent Medico Legal Unit (IMLU). Wafula worked as an advocacy officer for the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU). Mr. Wafula has presented papers on Africa’s political transition in Africa, human rights, and democracy at various international forums where he has earned recognition. He has participated as a faculty at the United Nation University-International Leadership Institute (UNU-ILI)in Amman, Jordan. At the UNU-ILI, he trained journalists from the Middle East and Developing countries on the challenges of reporting in conflict areas. He has also presented intellectual papers on topical issues about human rights in Africa and politicization of Religion in Middle East.

Matt Easton directs the Human Rights Defender program at Human Rights First. The Defenders Program conducts research and advocacy in support of advocates who come under attack for defending human rights. Matt supervises campaigns that include urgent actions, trial monitoring, public education, and dialogue with the U.S. and foreign governments. His own work focuses primarily on the countries of Southeast Asia. Prior to joining Human Rights First, Matt worked in both human rights and international development, as a U.S.-based consultant and while living in Indonesia, Timor Leste, India, and Zimbabwe. He has been a long-term and a short-term election observer for six elections in Indonesia, Timor Leste, and Nepal. Matt has B.A. in Anthropology from Haverford College and an M.A. in International Relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC

Dr. Roddy Brett is currently an Assistant Professor, Latin American Politics, Northern Arizona University and Professor, Social Sciences, Latin American Faculty for Social Science (FLACSO), Guatemala. He is the former Advisor to the UN System Guatemala (United Nations Development Programme, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) on human rights, indigenous peoples and citizenship. Dr. Roddy Brett has also served as the ormer Advisor in Indigenous Affairs to the Norwegian Embassy, Guatemala, and lived in Guatemala for seven years. His professional career combines fifteen years of academic research/teaching in Political Science, in themes including democratisation, genocide studies, political violence, social movements, human rights and indigenous issues with work as a practitioner in Latin America in said themes. His research interests are focused on Latin America, particularly Guatemala and Colombia. Include the role of non-elite civil actors in democratisation, including their impact upon political and socio-cultural processes at the institutional level and within civil society during military and transitional regimes, and post-conflict administrations.

Patrick Merloe is Director of Electoral Programs and Senior Associate at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). He has led or participated in over 140 international missions for NDI to more than 50 countries, including over 70 election-related missions. Pat was the lead drafter and negotiator in the development of the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation, which is endorsed by 32 international organizations, and he has worked with numerous domestic election monitoring groups. Pat has produced a dozen publications on comparative law, human rights and elections, including several on election monitoring. He has taught international human rights law at University of San Francisco School of Law and instructed at the University
of Pennsylvania Law School. Pat received his Juris Doctor degree form the University of Pennsylvania, conducted graduate work at the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, and completed his undergraduate education at Temple University.

Patrick Berg has a background in sociology and political science, with a special focus on human rights and democracy as well as conflict analysis. He served as long-term and short-term observer on election missions for The Carter Center, the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on three continents. He also served as a diplomat for the European Union and the German Foreign Office and worked as a freelance political analyst. Currently, he is working for Transparency International on issues of political corruption in the context of political party and election campaign funding.

Kwami Ahiabenu Kwama Ahiabenu is President of International Institute of ICT Journalism(penplusbytes) and Consultant -New media studies at Africa University College of Communications. He has over ten year of experience in Management, Marketing, New Media, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Development. Kwami is currently the Programme Manager at Government Assisted PC Programme and a former board member of Ghana Information Network for Knowledge Sharing (GINKS) Served as a Key Committee Member for the organization of World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) African Regional Meeting 2005. He is undertaken several training sessions on new media across Africa. He is a Steve Biko and Foster Davies Fellow .

As prolific writer, Kwami has a number of publications to his credit. With strong skills in ICT, his current research area is new media, web 2.0 and ICTs tools for knowledge management. He is providing leadership for African Elections Project (AEP) www.africanelections.org currently covering Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea.