Diane Sisely is Director of the Australian Centre for Human Rights Education hosted by RMIT University. She is a Member of the Victorian Mental Health Review Board, a founding Board Member of the Human Rights Law Resource Centre and a Member of the Committee for Liberty Victoria. She lead the Equal Opportunity Commission of Victoria from 1994 -2004, and previously was a Co Chair of Reconciliation Victoria and Chaired the Victorian Department of Human Services’ Human Research Ethics Committee. She has extensive knowledge and experience in working with all sectors of society to further respect for human rights.

Alice Nderitu is the Director ESJ Fahamu. She has worked previously as a journalist, a teacher as well as programme head on education and media programmes at the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and the Prisons. She has worked on designing and implementing capacity-building strategies, and on the entrenchment of human rights in formal curricula in the school system and law enforcement agencies.

She specializes in training on human rights, peace and conflict. She is also experienced in development of curriculums, information,education and communication materials.  She has developed training materials for and built capacities of UN agencies, civil society organizations, Law Enforcement and Military officers at the International Military Peace Support training College and the Rwanda Military Academy as well as several Police and Prisons training officers.

Mingzhen Ge is an Associate Professor at the Human Rights Center, Law School, Shandong  University in China providing human rights law courses (including bilingual international  human rights law course)  for undergraduate and graduate students.  He is now doing research about ESCR, torture and human rights, food rights, health rights, and human rights education.

My name is Susan Atwood and for the last six years I have been a course on Leadership for Global Citizenship to undergraduates at the University of Minnesota. In the previous twenty I had worked for a variety of not for profit international organizations in London, Brussels and Washington DC. My field of expertise is international political development.

Barbara A. Frey is Director of the Human Rights Program in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. The Program, established in 2001, provides academic, research and internship opportunities for students in the field of international human rights. Frey is well known as an international human rights teacher, advocate and scholar. She served from 2000-2003 as an alternate member of the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. From 2002-2006 Frey served as Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission to conduct a study on the issue of preventing human rights abuses committed with small arms and light weapons. From 1985 through 1996 Frey was Executive Director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. She is a co-convenor of the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights, a network of 44 organizations working to promote research and advocacy on human rights issues.

Kirk won the 2005 Glamour magazine non-fiction contest with her essay on the death penalty, available in the November 2005 issue. She frequently speaks and writes about Latin America, human rights and U.S. policy in the media. Kirk also works as an investigator on capital cases in North Carolina. In the Fall of 2006, she was a Fulbright lecturer at the Human Rights Center at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. Kirk authored, co-authored and edited over twelve reports for Human Rights Watch, all available on-line.

 In the 1980s, Kirk reported for U.S. media from Peru, where she covered the war between the government and the Shining Path. During that time, she also prepared reports for the U.S. Committee on Refugees, including the first report ever on the plight of Peru’s internally displaced people. The Decade of Chaqwa was followed by a second report, To Build Anew, dealing with the effort of some displaced families to return to their homes. Kirk also authored the first report chronicling the plight of the forcibly displaced in Colombia, Feeding the Tiger.

 Kirk is a former Radcliffe Bunting Fellow and is a past winner of the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award for Freelance Writing.

Amy Weismann is the Deputy Director for the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, a multidisciplinary center for teaching , scholarship and outreach to promote human rights and human rights education. Amy is an alumna of Bryn Mawr College (1993, A.B.) and the University of Iowa College of Law (2000 J.D. with Distinction). Amy served as a Law Clerk for the judges of the Seventh Judicial District of Iowa, and as a Legal Intern in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Amy also assisted the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice with the editing of the final judgment produced by the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal 2000 for the trial of Japanese military sexual slavery. Before law school, Amy was a humanitarian aid worker in refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia, and a resettlement caseworker for the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services affiliate offices in Eastern Iowa. She currently teaches in the International Studies program, an undergraduate, interdisciplinary major at the University of Iowa. Her course “Human Rights Advocacy: Perspectives and Problem Solving” has been offered for the first time this Fall.

  I have worked in the human rights field for the past 15 years. First voluntarily for FIAN, the international organisation working for the right to feed oneself. I was active for many years within the Swedish section and am now Vice President of FIAN International. I later joined the Swedish NGO Foundation for Human Rights and then the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI). I have worked as programme manager for our capacity development programmes in Latin America and the Middle East and, since 2005, have been head of our Africa Office based in Nairobi, Kenya. I have a degree in Social Anthropology and International Relations and an MSc in Gender Studies.