Najlaa is a Legal Consultant working with Rights for Peace on research into hate speech in Sudan. Previously, she was Acting Executive Director for Sudanese Rights Group as well as Human Rights Officer and Consultant for the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies where she specifically investigated torture in Sudan. Najlaa has further experience working at Human Rights Watch researching Sudanese women human rights defenders and at REDRESS as their Sudan Project Officer and coordinating their Criminal Laws Reform project and Prohibition of Torture in Sudan. 

Jehanne Henry is a lawyer, researcher and advocate with a particular focus on human rights and transitional justice. She consults with a range of Sudanese and international organizations. Until late 2020 she served as Human Rights Watch’s East Africa Director where she focused especially on Sudan and South Sudan but also carried out research in neighboring countries and the Sahel region. Previously she worked in Darfur, Kosovo and Cambodia with the United Nations, USAID and humanitarian organizations. She is an adjunct professor of human rights and a non-resident scholar at a US-based think tank, the Middle East Institute.

Rob is Director of International Development Practice at Social Finance. Earlier in his career Rob worked at the World Bank for eight years based in Mozambique and Washington, where he originated and managed a large portfolio of investments in southern Africa, as well as advising governments on policy and regulatory reforms. See his full profile.

Francesca Pizzutelli is Deputy Director and Head of the Refugee and Migrants’ Rights Team at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London. She has been working in the human rights field for over 20 years, for Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Child Soldiers International and Advocacy Forum, a human rights NGO based in Nepal. She holds a Masters degree in public international law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and developed her academic research as visiting scholar at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies of the University of Oxford. 

Peter is a founding partner and the CEO of Flavium, a consultancy providing strategic advice and interim-management services to non-profits. He was the Chief of Mission for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) South Sudan for three years, as well as Acting UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for South Sudan. Prior to this, he was the Western Balkans Coordinator and Country Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina for IOM, with prior roles at IOM in humanitarian assistance, transitional justice and peacebuilding in the Western Balkans, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Horn of Africa. Outside the UN, Peter worked as Executive Director of Avocats Sans Frontières, and was a lecturer in International Public and Criminal Law at the University of Turku in Finland. Peter is a lawyer by training and holds an LLM from the University of London and a BA in Law from the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

Julia is a qualitative field analyst and Director of Field Research at Select Equity Group. She is a former journalist and was Business Correspondent with the New York Times, briefly Editor at the Boston Consulting Group and European Reporter at Bloomberg News for 6 years. Julia volunteered for the Helen Bamberg Foundation, supporting their fundraising for over eight years. Julia has a BA and an MSc in European Studies from London School of Economics.

Sejal Parmar undertook a fellowship in Foreign Policy and Disinformation at the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in 2022-24. She  is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Cardiff, and continues to be a Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Vienna were previously she had been tenured Assistant Professor at the Department of Legal Studies and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy (now Department of Public Policy) at CEU in Budapest and then in Vienna. Alongside her academic career, Sejal previously worked as Senior Adviser to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Representative on Freedom of the Media and was Senior Legal Officer at ARTICLE 19 for a number of years, where she worked on freedom of speech and hate speech. See her full profile here. 

Lutz is Director of the Centre of Human Rights Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He convenes the Master's in Human Rights, Conflict and Justice and has published widely. He was formerly Legal Counsel at REDRESS Trust. View his SOAS profile here.