Alison Brysk is the Mellichamp Chair in Global Governance, Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She has authored or edited eight books on international human rights including the book From Human Trafficking to Human Rights. Professor Brysk has been a visiting scholar in Argentina, Ecuador, France, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Japan, and in 2007 held the Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Chair in Global Governance at Canada's Centre for International Governance Innovation.

 

Dr. Mohammed Mattar is the executive director of the Protection Project. He has worked in over 50 countries to promote state compliance with international human rights standards and has advised governments on drafting and implementing anti-trafficking legislation. He participated in drafting the United Nations model law on trafficking in persons and he authored the Inter-Parliamentarian Handbook on the appropriate responses to trafficking in persons. Dr. Mattar currently teaches courses on international and comparative law at Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) and American University, and has authored numerous publications for law reviews and the United Nations on international human rights and Islamic law, trafficking in persons and reporting mechanisms.

Madeline Rees, Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, began working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as the gender expert and Head of Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1998. In that capacity she worked extensively on the rule of law, gender and post conflict, transitional justice and the protection of social and economic rights. The OHCHR office dealt extensively with the issue of trafficking and Madeleine was a member of the expert coordination group of the trafficking task force of the Stability Pact, thence the Alliance against Trafficking. From September 2006 to April 2010 she was the head of the Women`s rights and gender unit.

Bradley Myles is the executive director and CEO at Polaris. Mr. Myles has provided consultation, training, and technical assistance on anti-trafficking strategies to hundreds of audiences, including human trafficking task forces and coalitions across the nation, government agencies, federal and local law enforcement, U.S. Members of Congress, media, service providers, and foreign delegations. He has also been a key advocate in bridging the national anti-trafficking program areas of multiple federal government agencies in the U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Justice, and Health and Human Services.

Helga Konrad is the head of the Austria Regional Initiative to Prevent and Combat all Forms of Human Trafficking. She has been working on the issue of human trafficking for more than 20 years at local, national, regional and international levels in various functions – as expert, advisor, manager, coordinator, parliamentarian and politician.

In her capacities as special representative, chair of the Stability Pact Task Force for South Eastern Europe and International Consultant she has provided assistance to governments and State authorities in developing national and transnational anti-trafficking strategies and in order to help improve their capacities to act on their own and in cooperation with others. From 2004 to 2006, she served as Special Representative on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings of the OSCE – Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. From 2000 to 2004, she served as regional co-ordinator and chair of the  EU Stability Pact Task Force on Human Trafficking for South Eastern Europe.

The Program on Human Rights Collaboratory Series is an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. It is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing we

Maxine Burkett is an Associate Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai‘i and serves as the inaugural Director of the Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy (ICAP), at the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant College Program.

Professor Burkett’s courses include Climate Change Law and Policy, Torts, Environmental Law, Race and American Law, and International Development. She has written in the area of Race, Reparations, and Environmental Justice. Currently, her work focuses on "Climate Justice," writing on the disparate impact of climate change on vulnerable communities, in the United States and globally. Her March 2007 conference "The Climate of Environmental Justice," at the University of Colorado, brought together leading academics, activists, and legal practitioners in the Environmental Justice field to consider the emerging interplay between race, poverty, and global warming.

Professor Burkett has presented her research on Climate Justice throughout the United States and in West Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean. She most recently served as the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics at the Wayne Morse Center, University of Oregon, as the Fall 2010 scholar for the Center’s “Climate Ethics and Climate Equity” theme of inquiry. She is the youngest scholar to hold the Wayne Morse Chair.

As the Director of ICAP, she leads projects to address climate change law, policy, and planning for island communities in Hawai‘i, the Pacific region, and beyond. In its first eighteen months, ICAP has completed several climate change adaptation related policy documents for Hawai‘i and other Pacific Island nations, specifically the Federated States of Micronesia. It has also hosted numerous outreach and education programs on island resiliency and climate change and engaged planning agencies in all four counties in Hawai‘i and seven state agencies and offices, as well as several federal entities and many state legislators. Most notably, ICAP has partnered with the Hawai‘i State Office of Planning to conduct early planning and assessment for a statewide Climate Change Adaptation Plan.

Professor Burkett attended Williams College and Exeter College, Oxford University, and received her law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked in private practice in Honolulu with Davis, Levin, Livingston and Paul, Johnson, Park & Niles, and served as a law clerk with The Honorable Susan Illston of the United States District Court, Northern District of California. Prior to her appointment at the University of Hawai‘i, Professor Burkett taught at the University of Colorado Law School. Professor Burkett is from the island of Jamaica, and now she and her husband raise their two young children on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.