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Sabrina Sanchez
Kenyon Farrow
Mirta Moragas
Guadalupe Marengo
Monica Tabengwa is a human rights lawyer from Botswana and is currently Policy Specialist for LGBTI Inclusion in Africa for the United National Development Programme (UNDP). She holds a masters (LLM) degree from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. An experienced human rights advocate, feminist with extensive experience in human rights and social justice advocacy. She has been a co-founder and supporter of all things LEGABIBO, an LGBTI organisation in Botswana which has been behind the campaign to decriminalize same-sex relations in Botswana.
Sibongile Ndashe is the founder and executive director of Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA). She is a feminist who works at the intersection of public interest litigation, movement-building, legal empowerment and capacity strengthening. Sibongile has worked as a public interest lawyer for over twenty years and has designed and implemented capacity-strengthening programmes for lawyers for over fifteen years. She nurtures young lawyers with a view to developing a pool of feminist litigators. As a lawyer at the Internal Centre for the Protection of Human Rights (Interights) and at ISLA, she has litigated cases before the African human rights system and supported lawyers to litigate cases before national courts in different African countries.
Her work focuses on women’s rights and people whose rights are violated on the basis of gender identity and expression and sexual orientation. She is an organizer and works with different social justice formations to push back on attacks against anti-rights actors that are intended to reverse feminist gains. She also works with different coalitions before the African Human Rights System to develop normative standards, hold states accountable and strengthen the mechanisms to ensure that they are able to deliver on their protective mandate.
Ambika Satkunanathan is a human rights advocate based in Sri Lanka. She has a B.A. and LL.B from Monash University Australia and a LL.M from University of Nottingham, where she was a Chevening Scholar. Ambika was also an Open Society Fellow 2020-2022. For more than twenty years she has worked with persons and communities impacted by human rights violations, especially in the conflict-affected North and East, and assisted them access remedies. From Oct 2015 to March 2020, she was a Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, where she led the first national study of prisons. Prior to that for 8 years she was a Legal Advisor to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
She is a board member of the UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Torture, a member of the Expert Panel of the Trial Watch Project of the Clooney Foundation and a member of the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. Her research, advocacy and activism have focused on counter-terrorism law and policy, drug control and treatment, transitional justice, custodial violence, penal policy, militarization and gender, drug control, detention and rehabilitation. She is Chairperson of the Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust, a local grantmaking organisation in Sri Lanka and was a founder-member and Vice Chairperson of Urgent Action Fund - Asia and Pacific, a feminist regional grantmaking organisation.
Alla Bessonova is the coordinator of the Expert Feminist Council of the Eurasian Network of People Who Use Drugs (ENPUD). She is a narcofeminist, activist and co-author of scientific articles on women who use drugs. Alla is co-founder and chairperson of the Board of the Women's Network of Key Communities in Kyrgyzstan, and coordinates ENPUD's EFC. Alla has influenced ENPUD's tactical plan to make the development of “Narcofeminism” one of the main objectives for 2024-2026. She is a member of the Secretariat of the Eurasian Women's Network on AIDS (EWNA). This year, at the initiative of ENPUD, EWNA, and Eurasian Harm Reduction Association (EHRA), Alla is one of the winners of the Judy Byrne Emerging Female Leader Award 2024. Now in its third year, this prestigious award is designed to foster expertise and resilience in the next generation of women who use drugs.
Alla is well-known as a narcofeminist in the Eastern European and Central Asian region for her devotion to the development of women's activism in this area. Alla believes that supporting and developing the potential of women, through the lens of narcofeminism, will provide an opportunity to reform and transform the current system of prohibition.
Glynn-Devon Bryan is a Jamaican trans activist and community organizer who collaborates with organizations such as TransWave and Equality JA. Glynn-Devon is driven by a passion for increasing awareness in Jamaica's challenging homophobic & transphobic environment. He initiated two impactful programs: Trans-Q Fitness (a community fitness space designed specifically around the needs of LGBTIQ+ persons), GBETRY JA (a trans-owned business providing chest-binders and a range of products for gender-diverse persons). He is the founder of the Cari-Trans Support Group: a support group which also provides services for transmasc and gender-nonconforming communities, and is also notably one of the few transmasc-led community groups in Jamaica.
Serene Lim is a feminist activist, researcher and lawyer. She works at the intersections of gender, technology and power. She was the Partner-Director of KRYSS Network, a national non-profit organisation in Malaysia and led the organisation’s programme on online gender-based violence. Her work for the past 10 years has focused on deepening our understanding on the manifestation of gender-based violence through technology and linking the issues of freedom of expression to power and inequalities. She has conducted training and workshops, co-developed a resource toolkit for online gender-based violence, and co-led multiple advocacy and research initiatives towards building a feminist internet for all.
Maria Carinnes Alejandria is an anthropologist who researches on issues relating to disaster and health inequalities in Southeast Asia. Dr. Alejandria is an Assistant Professor at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She completed her PhD in Anthropology from the University of the Philippines Diliman where she explored food insecurity and disaster resilience among older adults in an informal settlement in Manila. She currently leads a multi-country project exploring flood preparedness among urban communities in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. She is also affiliated with Brown University Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies as a Global Fellow, the University of Melbourne as a SEED fellow, the Social Weather Stations as a Fellow, and the Institute of Advanced Studies of Loughborough University as a Residential Fellow. She has consulted and led projects related to social health, disaster resilience, and humanitarian coordination that were funded by international agencies and national governments.
Alice M. Miller, JD is the Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership of Yale Law and Public Health Schools. She engages critically with the theory and practice of rights around gender, sexuality, and health, in the context of criminal, human rights, and humanitarian law. She has taught at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Columbia University, and has three decades of advocacy and training experience, collaborating with local, national and international NGOs in the US and globally; she has also carried out projects with the WHO, the UNOHCHR, and other inter-governmental agencies. She co-edited, Beyond Virtue and Vice: Rethinking Human Rights and Criminal Law (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and continues to advocate, write and teach in these areas.
Arvind Narrain is a lawyer, writer and activist on human rights issues. He is a visiting Faculty at the National Law School of India where he teaches courses on international human rights law and constitutional law. He is founder member of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India, a collective of young lawyers who work on a critical practise of law, and is a founding board Member of QAMRA (Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism) which is a queer archive based in the National Law School. He is the author of India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance and the co-editor of Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law as well as Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. He was also a part of the team of lawyers challenging Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, right from the High Court in 2009 to the Supreme Court in 2018.