Members

Sultana Kamal is a lawyer, former Advisor to the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh and human rights activist for over 35 years. Worked with UNHCR as a Legal Consultant for the Vietnamese boatpeople in Hong Kong from 1989 to 1990. Recipient of John Humphrey Freedom Award in 1996 from HRD, Canada for her role as a human rights defender. A published author on human rights issues, widely contributes to national newspapers and lectures on human rights, women’s rights, development and law, nationally and internationally.

Lord Eric Avebury was an MP from 1962 to 1970, and has sat in the Lords since 1971. He was chair of the Parliamentary Civil Liberties Group, concerned with UK domestic human rights, from 1964 to 1970.  In 1976 he founded the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, and served as Chair of the Group until 1997. Since then he has been Vice-Chair of the Group. Lord Avebury is Chair of the International Bangladesh Foundation.

Elsa Stamatapoulou teaches at Columbia University with affiliations to the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Anthropology. She was the first Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2003-2010). She has a law degree and has headed the UN Centre for Human Rights in New York for 10 years, was the Deputy Director in the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and has also served as the Senior Legal Adviser to the Under-Secretary General for Administration and Management at UN Headquarters.

Sara Hossain is a lawyer practicing in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, and a Senior Associate at the law firm of Dr. Kamal Hossain and Associates. She is a Board Member of Ain o Salish Kendra, a national human rights and legal organisation. She formerly ran the South Asia Programme at INTERIGHTS, the International Centre for the Protection of Human Rights, based in London. She has written and lectured on human rights, public interest litigation, access to justice and women’s human rights. She was a member of the National Committee for Protection of Fundamental Rights in the CHT, a forum of Bangladeshi activists established and active through the 1990s, and has been involved in fact-finding, documentation and advocacy – both in and outside the courts – on the protection of fundamental rights in the CHT.

Shapan Adnan was educated at the universities of Sussex and Cambridge and currently teaches in the South Asian Studies Programme of the National University of Singapore. He has held appointments at various institutions including Queen Elizabeth House of the University of Oxford, the University of Dhaka, and the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies. His research interests include peasant economy and capitalist development, strategies of domination and resistance among the peasantry, ethnic conflict and land rights of indigenous peoples, critiques of flood control structures, determinants of fertility and forced migration, and critiques of the development business. He has recently published a book entitled Migration, Land Alienation and Ethnic Conflict: Causes of Poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (2004).

Lars-Anders Baer studied law at Uppsala University. He is the president of the Sámi Parliament in Sweden.  Baer has been engaged in the Sámi and the international indigenous movement since the early 1970s. Since 2002 he has served as member of the board of the UN Voluntary Fund of indigenous peoples. Since 1983 he has been deeply involved in the UN working group of indigenous populations and in the mid-1980s he served as vice president of the World Council of Indigenous peoples.   Over the years he has served as expert and Sámi representative in Swedish official delegations in different UN, European Union and other regional and international events.  He has been the president of the Sámi Parliamentary Council (the highest body in co-operation between the Sámi Parliaments in Finland, Norway and Sweden) and is at present time the vice president of the Council.  Since the beginning of the 1980s he has also been engaged in the Union of the Swedish Sámi (the main Sámi organisation in Sweden) of which he served as chairman from 1993 to 2001. Baer has published several articles about indigenous rights. Together with his family, he also spends time with traditional reindeer herding.

Muhammed Zafar Iqbal, has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Washington, USA. He had served as a research scientist at Caltech and Bell Communications and Research in the United States before returning to Bangladesh in 1994 and becoming a Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST) in Sylhet, Bangladesh. He is a distinguished writer and author of more than 100 books of fiction, science fiction, popular science and contemporary issues in Bengali. Professor Iqbal has been honoured with various national awards for his contribution to literature, science and education.

Michael C. van Walt van Praag is a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in New Jersey, at the School of Historical Studies (Modern International Relations and International Law). He is the Council Member and Executive President of Kreddha: International Peace Council for States, Peoples and Minorities, an international non-governmental organisation of eminent persons created to help prevent and resolve violent intrastate conflicts. He is also the Adjunct Professor of International Law at Golden Gate University School of Law at San Francisco, California. From 1984 Michael served as the Legal Advisor to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and to the Tibetan government in exile. For ten years (1997-2007) he served as a Member of the Netherlands Development Assistance Research Council (RAWOO), which is an advisory body of the government of the Netherlands where he has chaired the committee on post armed conflict and peace consolidation, the preparation and chairing of international seminars on post armed conflict transformation and the conduct of fact-finding missions to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, and to Guatemala. He also founded and served as the General Secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) which is an organisation of nations, peoples and minorities that are not represented in international forums such as the United Nations. Michael has also worked as a Consultant for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), a Legal advisor to the All-Bougainville Leaders Peace Talks in Cairns, Australia, an Advisor to the Chechen Government delegation in negotiations between the Chechen Republic and the Russian Federation in Grozny, Chechenyaand an Advisor to the Abkhazian Government delegation in peace talks between Georgia and Abkhazia. He has been published widely on various social, political and legal issues.