Payam Akhavan
Special Adviser on Genocide
International Criminal Court

Professor Payam Akhavan was born in Tehran, Iran, and migrated to Canada in his childhood. He completed his PhD at Harvard University and served as the first Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1994-2000) at The Hague. He also served with the UN in Bosnia, Rwanda, and other conflict zones around the world, appeared as counsel in landmark cases before international courts and tribunals, and served as Special Advisor on Genocide to the Prosecutor of the ICC.

He is currently the Human Rights Chair at Massey College, University of Toronto, Member of the Honourable Society of Middle Temple in London, and Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Associate Member of the Institut de droit international, Member of the Order of Ontario, recipient of the Human Rights Award of the Law Society of Ontario, and Member of the Standing Table on Human Rights of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada.

Federico Borello
Interim Executive Director
Human Rights Watch

Federico Borello is the Interim Executive Director at Human Rights Watch and is based in The Hague. He joined Human Rights Watch in 2024 and oversees the organization’s programmatic work, with specific attention to its research, advocacy, communications, and legal and policy departments.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Borello was the Executive Director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) for nearly a decade. He also served as Director of Investments at Humanity United and as a Senior Policy Advisor to Mary Robinson, the United Nations special envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa. Other roles include being a legal adviser for the UN International Commission of Inquiry on Guinea and the UN Justice Mapping Exercise in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and as Coordinator for the Transitional Justice Unit at the UN Mission in the Congo. He has also worked as a senior associate at the International Center for Transitional Justice and had a host of other human rights roles focusing on Argentina, Cambodia, Rwanda, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, among other countries.

Borello holds a law degree from the University of Milan, Italy, and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York. He speaks English, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Tania Bruguera
Head of Media and Performance
Harvard University

Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power. By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.

She expands the definition and range of performance art, sometimes performing solo but more often staging participatory events and interactions that build on her own observations, experiences, and interpretations of the politics of repression and control. Bruguera has explored both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution in performances that provoke viewers to consider the political realities masked by government propaganda and mass-media interpretation. Advancing the concept of arte útil (literally, useful art; art as a benefit and a tool), she proposes solutions to sociopolitical problems through the implementation of art, and has developed long-term projects that include a community center and a political party for immigrants, and a school for behavior art.

Tania Bruguera attended art schools in Havana, including the Instituto Superior de Arte (1987-92), and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001). She received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (1998), and has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan (2002); Headlands Centers for the Arts (1998); Fundación Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Maracay (1998); Art in General (1997); and ART/OMI (1995). Major exhibitions of her work have appeared at the Van Abbemuseum (2014); Queens Museum (2013); National Museum Wales (2012); Havana Biennial (2010, 2003, 2000); Neuberger Museum of Art (2010); Venice Biennale (2009, 2001); Tate Modern (2008); Moscow Biennial (2007); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006); Shanghai Biennial (2004); Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta (2002); San Francisco Art Institute (2002); SITE Santa Fe Biennial (1999) and the São Paulo Bienal (1996). Tania Bruguera lives and works in Queens, New York.

Lama Fakih
Acting Deputy Executive Director
and Chief Program Officer
Human Rights Watch

Lama Fakih is Human Rights Watch's Acting Deputy Executive Director and Chief Program Officer. Prior to her current acting role, Fakih was Middle East and North Africa Director and the Director of the Beirut office from March 2022 through March 2025 . She was the Director of the Crisis and Conflict Division from October 2019 through February 2022 and the Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Division from September 2016 through September 2019. She was a Senior Crisis Advisor in Amnesty International's Crisis Response Program and was Human Rights Watch's Syria and Lebanon researcher from 2011 to 2015.

Previously, she worked as the Gender, Human Rights, and Counter-Terrorism Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at the New York University School of Law. In 2008 to 2009 she was the Center Fellow at CHRGJ, where she worked on a range of human rights issues including corporate accountability and human rights and counter-terrorism. Additionally, Fakih was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research on the implementation of Islamic law in the Egyptian National Courts.

Fakih holds a bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College and a law degree from New York University, where she was awarded the Ann Petluck Poses Memorial Prize for her work in the university's International Human Rights Clinic. She speaks English and Arabic.

Maria Ressa
2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and CEO, Rappler

Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler's CEO, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, forced to post bail ten times to stay free. Rappler's battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.

For her courage and journalistic integrity, Maria has received numerous accolades. In October 2021, she was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her "efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace."

In 2022, she was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General to the Leadership Panel of the Internet Governance Forum and serves as its Vice-Chair.

She is a Professor of Practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she leads projects within the Institute of Global Politics related to artificial intelligence and democracy.

Maria authored Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook. Her most recent book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, was released in November 2022 and has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Maria focuses critical attention on the breakdown of our global information ecosystem and how interconnected communities of action can hold the line to protect democratic values.

Allan Rock
President Emeritus
University of Ottawa

Allan Rock is President Emeritus of the University of Ottawa, and a former Professor in its Faculty of Law, where he taught International Humanitarian Law and Armed Conflict in International Law.

He practised in civil, administrative and commercial litigation for 20 years (1973-93) with a national law firm in Toronto, appearing as counsel in a wide variety of cases before courts at all levels, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He was inducted in 1988 as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He is a former Treasurer (President) of the Law Society of Ontario.

Allan Rock was elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1993, and re-elected in 1997 and 2000. He served for that decade as a senior minister in the government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, in both social and economic portfolios. He was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada (1993-97), Minister of Health (1997-2002) and Minister of Industry and Infrastructure (2002-03).

He was appointed in 2003 as Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations in New York during a period that involved responding to several complex regional conflicts, including those in Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur. He led the successful Canadian effort in New York to secure, at the 2005 World Summit, the unanimous adoption by UN member states of The Responsibility to Protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing and other mass atrocities. He participated in the negotiation (in Abuja, Nigeria) of the Darfur Peace Agreement in May, 2006. He later served as a Special Envoy for the United Nations investigating the unlawful use of child soldiers in Sri Lanka during its civil war.

In 2008, Allan Rock became the 29th President and Vice Chancellor of the University of Ottawa, a comprehensive university of 50,000 students, faculty and staff. uOttawa is ranked among the Top Ten in Canada for research intensity, and is the largest bilingual university (French-English) in the world. He completed two terms as uOttawa President in 2016.

Allan Rock was subsequently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, associated with the Program on International Law and Armed Conflict. He is a member of the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, and a Senior Advisor to the World Refugee and Migration Council. Allan Rock is a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. He is married to Deborah Hanscom and they have four children.