2006-2007

Mark Malloch Brown
Mark Malloch Brown is Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. Before his current appointment, he was the Secretary-General’s Chef de Cabinet since January 2005. In that position, he worked closely with the Secretary-General and the Deputy-Secretary General on all aspects of UN work, including helping to set out an ambitious reform agenda for the United Nations. Prior to becoming Chef de Cabinet, Mr. Malloch Brown served as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UN’s global development network, from July 1999 to August 2005. During that time, he was also the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues. He has also served as the Former Vice President for External Affairs at the World Bank.

Irwin Cotler
The Honorable Irwin Cotler was Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2003-2006. He currently serves in the Canadian House of Commons for the constituency of Mount Royal. Mr. Cotler was a professor of law at McGill University and the director of its Human Rights Program from 1973 until his election as a Member of Parliament in 1999. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Yale Law School and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates. He was appointed in 1992 as an Officer of the Order of Canada. He is a past president of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

Peter Galbraith
Peter Galbraith is the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. From 1979 to 1993, Galbraith was a senior advisor to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is the author of published Foreign Relations Committee reports on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Iraqi Kurds. In the late 1980s, Galbraith helped expose Saddam Hussein’s murderous “al-anfal” campaign against the Iraqi Kurds. Galbraith served as the first US Ambassador to Croatia and has held senior positions in the US Government and the United Nations. As US Ambassador to Croatia, Galbraith was actively involved in the Croatia and Bosnia peace processes. From January 2000 to August 2001, Ambassador Galbraith was Director for Political, Constitutional and Electoral Affairs for the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). He also served as Cabinet Member for Political Affairs and Timor Sea in the First Transitional Government of East Timor. In these roles, he designed the territory’s first interim government and the process to write East Timor’s permanent constitution.

Marrack Goulding
As United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs from 1993 to 1997 and Head of Peacekeeping from 1986, Sir Marrack Goulding was responsible for United Nations’ preventive and peacemaking efforts worldwide. He was in charge of major operations in many of the world’s ‘hot’ spots. Under his leadership, peacekeeping grew from five operations with some 10,000 personnel and an annual budget of $242 million to 13 operations with 55,000 personnel and a budget of $2.7 billion. Prior to his assignments at the United Nations, Sir Goulding served the British Government as a Diplomat. In 1997 he left the United Nations to become Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Peacemonger.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Saad Eddin Ibrahim is a leading Egyptian pro-democracy Activist. He is the founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, and is Professor of Political Sociology at the American University of Cairo. Prior to these activities, Mr. Ibrahim was the Secretary General of the Egyptian Independent Commission for Electoral Review and was a Trustee of the Arab Thought Forum. He is the author of Bridging the Gap: Intellectuals and Decision Makers in the Arab World and The New Arab Social Order.

Mohammed Ihsan
Dr. Mohammed Ihsan is Minister for Extra-Regional Affairs. Prior to this appointment, from 2001 to 2006, Dr. Ihsan was Minister of Human Rights, where he helped gather and record information about the Ba’ath Party crimes against the Kurdish people. He was one of the first to discover mass graves and gather forensic evidence about the al-anfal campaign. As a young man, he fought with the Peshmerga resistance and was exiled to the United Kingdom, where he worked as a lawyer with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In this new Ministry, Dr Ihsan is devoted to the reintegration of originally Kurdish areas confiscated and “arabized” by Saddam Hussein regime, which includes Kirkuk, Mosul, Khanaqin, Mendeli, Zurbaniya, Makhmour, Shai Khan, Zumar and Singar.

Mukesh Kapila
Dr. Mukesh Kapila is currently Director in the Department of Health Action in Crises at the World Health Organization in Geneva. He was the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, and the UNDP Resident Representative for the Sudan in 2003-2004. Prior to this, he was Special Adviser to the United Nations from 2002-2003, latterly to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and earlier to the Special Representative of the Secretary General in Afghanistan. In 2003, he was honored with a CBE by Her Brittanic Majesty, The Queen, for international service. Dr Kapila has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), and the International Peace Academy (IPA). He has worked extensively in relation to crisis and conflict management, humanitarian aid, disaster reduction, and post-conflict recovery in relation to many countries in Africa, Asia and Europe, leading or participating in several international missions. He is also a member of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Co-ordination (UNDAC) system. His educational background is originally in medicine and public health, and subsequently in international development, with qualifications from the Universities of Oxford and London.

Alberto Mora
Alberto Mora is a recently retired General Counsel of the U.S. Navy. He led an effort within the Defense Department to oppose the legal theories of John Yoo and to try to end coercive interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, which he argued are unlawful. From 1989 to 1993, he served in the administration of the President George H.W. Bush as general counsel to the United States Information Agency. He was later appointed three times by President Bill Clinton to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America and other U.S. information services. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Mora as the General Counsel of the U.S. Navy, the most senior civilian lawyer for the Navy. Mora retired from the Navy in January 2006. He has since become the chief counsel for Wal-Mart’s international division.

Sam Nunn
Sam Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a charitable organization working to reduce the global threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. He served as a United States Senator from Georgia for 24 years (1972-1996). During his tenure in the U.S. Senate, Senator Nunn served as chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He also served on the Intelligence and Small Business Committees. His legislative achievements include the landmark Department of Defense Reorganization Act, drafted with the late Senator Barry Goldwater, and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides assistance to Russia and the former Soviet republics for securing and destroying their excess nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. To date, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program has deactivated more than 5,900 nuclear warheads. In 2005, Nunn teamed up with former Senator Fred Thompson to promote a new film, Last Best Chance, on the dangers of excess nuclear weapons and materials. The film aired on HBO in October of 2005. In addition to his work with NTI, Senator Nunn has continued his service in the public policy arena as a distinguished professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech and as chairman of the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Michael Posner
Michael Posner, President of Human Rights First, has been at the forefront of the international human rights movement for nearly 30 years. As President, he focuses mainly on public outreach, writing, and public advocacy, to advance the organization’s core mission. Since its founding in 1978, Human Rights First has supported and partnered with frontline rights activists around the world, in places like Guatemala, Russia, Northern Ireland, Egypt, Zimbabwe, and Indonesia. It has also been a leading advocate for the rights of refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. In 1980, Mr. Posner played a key role in campaigning for the first U.S. law providing for political asylum, which became part of the Refugee Act of 1980. Mr. Posner proposed, drafted, and campaigned for the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) – a U.S. federal statute that was designed to give victims of the most serious human rights crimes anywhere in the world a remedy in U.S. courts. The TVPA was adopted by Congress and signed into law in 1992. In 1998, Mr. Posner led the Human Rights First delegation to the Rome conference at which the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was adopted. The ICC is the first international tribunal to prosecute violations for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Samantha Power
Samantha Power is The Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy. Power’s New Yorker article on the horrors in Darfur, Sudan won the 2005 National Magazine Award for best reporting. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998-2002). From 1993-1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Economist. Power is the editor, with Graham Allison, of Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She spent 2005-06 working in the office of Senator Barack Obama and is currently writing a political biography of the UN’s Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Orville Schell
Orville Schell has devoted most of his professional life to reporting and writing about Asia. Author of 14 books, nine about China, including Discos and Democracy, Mandate of Heaven, and Virtual Tibet, Dean Schell also has written for WIRED, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, The New Yorker, Harpers and Newsweek. In the broadcast sector, Schell has served as correspondent for several PBS “FRONTLINE” documentaries and an Emmy-winning program on CBS’60 Minutes. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, an Overseas Press Club Award and the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for covering Asia. Schell has a degree in Far Eastern history from Harvard University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. (ABD) in Chinese history from the University of California at Berkeley.

Frances Townsend
Ms. Frances Fragos Townsend is Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. Ms. Townsend chairs the Homeland Security Council and reports to the President on United States Homeland Security policy and Combating Terrorism matters. She previously served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism. Ms. Townsend came to the White House from the U. S. Coast Guard, where she had served as Assistant Commandant for Intelligence. Prior to that, Ms. Townsend spent 13 years at the U. S. Department of Justice in a variety of senior positions, her last assignment as Counsel to the Attorney General for Intelligence Policy. Ms. Townsend began her prosecutorial career in 1985, serving as an Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn, New York.