Council members
The Council has up to 30 members. Council members are appointed by the Board, on the recommendation of an appointments committee composed of one Board member and two Council members. Council members meet annually to advise the Board on new themes for research. Council members may serve for up to six years. Council members serve in a private capacity, and do not represent their institutions.
Lydia Alpízar Durán (Costa Rica)
Lydia Alpízar Durán is Executive Director of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), where she has also worked as Feminist Movements and Organizations Theme Manager. Lydia has extensive experience in advocacy and training on women’s human rights. She facilitated the participation of young women from Latin America in the UN Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing 95) process, and in 2000 she was the Latin American regional representative to the International NGO Committee for Beijing +5. Also, she participated for several years in the Campaign “Stop Impunity: No more murdered women”, a national Mexican initiative to put an end to the killings of women in the US/Mexico border city of Ciudad Juárez. Lydia is co-founder and advisor of ELIGE - Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights (Mexico), and she is also co-founder of the Latin American and Caribbean Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights. Since 1996, she has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Committee for the Peace Council. She is member of the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women and of the Central American Women’s Fund. Lydia is Sociologist by training.
Fateh Azzam (Palestine)
Fateh Azzam is currently Regional Representative for OHCHR in the Middle East and Board Chair of the newly-established Arab Human Rights Fund (AHRF) in Beirut. Previously, he was Director of the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Programme at the American University in Cairo, worked as Programme Officer for Human Rights at the Cairo office of the Ford Foundation and was Director of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq in Ramallah. Fateh received LLM in International Human Rights Law from Essex University, Colchester, United Kingdom in 1992.
Akila Belembaogo (Burkina Faso)
Akila Belembaogo is Deputy Regional Director of UNICEF’s Office for the Middle East and North Africa. Previously she was Head of the Gender Equality and Human Rights Unit in the Division of Policy and Planning of UNICEF, and as the UNICEF Representative to Chad. From 1992 to 1995 Akila assumed the function of Minister of Social Action and Family in Burkina Faso. At this position, she was able to put in place a national mechanism to report on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and she contributed to the adoption of strategies and laws for the protection of vulnerable populations including children. She has also been member and Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Akila has contributed as author or co-author of various articles and publications on children’s rights.
Tapan Kumar Bose (India)
Tapan Kumar Bose is Secretary General of the South Asia Forum for Human Rights in Nepal. He is also an award winning documentary filmmaker, human rights and peace activist, and writer. He is the Convenor of the Committee for Initiative on Kashmir and General Secretary of the Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy. Tapan set up Cinemart Foundation in 1977, India’s first independent documentary film producer’s forum. He is the Chairperson of The Other Media and of Mahanirvan Calcutta Research Group. He is also a Council Member of Forum for Early Warning and Early Response (FEWER), London. He contributes regularly to leading journals and news magazines in India, Nepal and Pakistan and his international and national award winning films include An Indian Story, Beyond Genocide: Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Behind the Barricades – Punjab and Jharkhand.
Roberta Clarke (Trinidad & Tobago)
Roberta Clarke is the Regional Programme Director of UNIFEM Caribbean Office. She is a sociologist and attorney at law with a specialisation in human rights law. She has written extensively on gender and development including on violence against women and gender mainstreaming. She has a long history of activism on women’s rights within the NGO movement in the Caribbean. Affiliations include Vice President of the Trinidad and Tobago Family Planning Association, Editor of the legal journal of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago The Lawyer and Board member of the organisation Women, Law and Development International.
Lyse Doucet (Canada)
Lyse Doucet is a presenter and correspondent for BBC World Television and BBC World Service Radio. She is also one of the regular presenters on the BBC’s Talking Point programme. She is often deployed to anchor special news coverage from the field, and has presented from Amman, Jordan and from Iraq during the war of 2003. After the events of 11 September 2001, Lyse anchored special programmes from Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout the war that followed in Afghanistan, and she was later nominated for a Royal Television Society Award for her exclusive coverage of the attempted assassination of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Before joining the BBC’s team of presenters, Lyse spent more than a decade working as a BBC foreign correspondent in the Middle East, in West and South Asia and in West and North Africa.
Tiébilé Dramé (Mali)
Tiébilé Dramé is the Former Foreign Minister of the transitional government of Mali 1991-1992 and leader of the Party for the National Rebirth (Parti pour la renaissance nationale, PARENA). He was member and later President of the inter-parliamentary Committee of the Economic and Monetary West African Union, the pre-Parliament of Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine (UEMOA). Tiébilé has also held seat with the Malian National Assembly as Deputy for the Western Sahel as an elected official of PARENA. He has also served as Minister in charge of arid and semi-arid regions in 1996-1997. A human rights activist and journalist, Tiébilé worked during several years as researcher for Amnesty International in London and has also founded the weekly newspaper Le républicain. He is a former “prisoner of conscience” adopted by Amnesty International.
Imrana Jalal (Fiji)
Imrana Jalal is Human Rights Advisor at the Regional Rights Resources Team (RRRT), a Pacific regional human rights project based in Fiji. Imrana is a feminist lawyer, activist and opinion shaper in the Pacific Islands region. She is also a founding member of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement and works locally, regionally and internationally as a human rights lawyer.
Hina Jilani (Pakistan)
Hina Jilani is Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Human Rights Defenders. She is also Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. She is the founding member of several national, regional and international human rights organisations. In 1981 she established the first all-woman law firm in Pakistan, along with her sister, Asma Jahangir. In 1984 Hina and Asma set up AGHS Legal Aid, the first free legal aid centre in Pakistan. She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Millennium Peace Prize in 2001. She is specialised in human rights and constitutional rights litigation. Special areas of concern and activity in the field of human rights have been democratic development, the rights of women, minorities and children.
Konstantin Korkelia (Georgia)
Konstantin Korkelia is First Deputy Minister of Justice in Georgia and Deputy Director of the Institute of State and Law at the Georgian Academy of Sciences. He is also Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of International Law and International Relations, Tbilisi State University. From 2000 to 2002 he was Government Representative of Georgia to the European Court of Human Rights. His areas of specialisation are public international law, international protection of human rights and treaty law.
Ian Martin (United Kingdom)
Ian Martin is Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Nepal, where he was previously Representative of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. He has worked for the UN in various capacities, including as Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the East Timor Popular Consultation, Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, Special Adviser to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Chief of the UN Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda, and Director for Human Rights of the International Civilian Mission in Haiti. He also served in the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina as Deputy High Representative for Human Rights. He was Secretary-General of Amnesty International from 1986-92 and Vice President of the International Center for Transitional Justice 2002-05. His writings include Self-Determination in East Timor: the United Nations, the Ballot, and International Intervention.
Jessica Montell (Israel)
Jessica Montell is Executive Director of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Prior to joining B’Tselem, Jessica Montell worked at HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, another Israeli human rights organisation. Jessica Montell also served as a consultant to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. She is the author of B’Tselem’s comprehensive report Prisoners of Peace: Administrative Detention in the Oslo Process, and has published numerous articles and given presentations on human rights and counter-terrorism, accountability for human rights violations, international humanitarian law and the challenges of promoting human rights in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Devendra Raj Panday (Nepal)
Devendra Raj Panday is former Finance Secretary and Finance Minister in Nepal and a founding Bureau Member of South Asians for Human Rights. He is also an elected member of the International Board of Directors of Transparency International, Berlin and the former President of its Nepalese chapter. He was also the Founding Vice Chairman of Human Rights Organisation of Nepal. After he resigned his civil service post in 1980, he has become well known for his professional and civic society engagements in Nepal and South Asia.
Jelena Pejic (Serbia)
Jelena Pejic is a Legal Adviser at the Legal Division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva responsible, among other things, for issues related to terrorism and international humanitarian law. She also heads the ICRC’s Project on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law. Prior to the ICRC, she was Senior Program Coordinator at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York (now Human Rights First) and was a lecturer in Public International Law and International Relations at Belgrade University Law School.
Roger Raupp Rios (Brazil)
Roger Raupp Rios is a Federal Judge since 1994 in the State of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. He is also a Professor of Law at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. As an academic researcher, he has studied the United States Supreme Court’s equal protection doctrine to elaborate his Master’s thesis research on a comparative study between the principle of equality in Brazilian Law and the equal protection doctrine facing sexual orientation discrimination. He has done extensive work with different women’s rights and LGBTT organisations in Brazil and in other countries in the region. He was a Visiting Scholar of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, New York. He has a Ph.D in Law focused on a systematical examination of affirmative action through a comparative study between the principle of equality in Brazilian Law and the equal protection doctrine developed in American Constitutional Law.
Anthony Romero (United States)
Anthony Romero is Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Prior to that, he led the Ford Foundation’s Human Rights and International Cooperation Program. He also served for nearly five years as a Ford Foundation Programme Officer for Civil Rights and Racial Justice; and for two years on the programme staff of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a member of the New York Bar Association and has sat on numerous non-profit boards. He is a graduate of Stanford University Law School and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs.
Marco Sassoli (Switzerland)
Marco Sassoli is Professor of International Law at the University of Geneva since 2004. He chairs the Boards of Geneva Call, an NGO engaging non-state armed groups to comply with humanitarian rules, and of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. From 2001 to 2003 he was Professor in the Legal Studies Department of the Political Science and Law Faculty at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), where he continues to serve as Associate Professor. He served as Clerk to the Swiss Federal Tribunal in Lausanne, and before that as Executive Secretary of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. For thirteen years, he worked at the International Committee of the Red Cross, in Geneva, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.
Wilder Tayler (Uruguay)
Wilder Tayler, a Uruguayan lawyer, is Deputy Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Between 1997 and 2007 he was Legal and Policy Director of Human Rights Watch. From 1995 to 1996, he was Programme Director of the Americas Region of Amnesty International. Between 1990 and 1995, he was Legal Advisor of Amnesty International with responsibility for the Americas and Asia regional programmes. From 1987 to 1990 he was Executive Director of the Institute for Legal and Social Studies (IELSUR) in Uruguay and before that, Legal Officer (1983-1987), co-ordinating the Institute’s defence of political prisoners.