Members of CHT Commission
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 boat people 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.
Elsa Stamatapoulou teaches at Columbia University with affiliations to the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Department of Anthropology, and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights as Director of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Program . 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, among other UN positions.
Myrna Cunningham is a Miskita feminist and indigenous rights activist from Nicaragua. She served as the Chairperson of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues until 2012.
Cunningham first studied to be a primary school teacher. She then went on to study medicine, becoming the first Miskito doctor in Nicaragua. She worked first as a general practitioner and later as a surgeon, until 1979. After the Sandinista Revolution, she worked in the Ministry of Public Health. She later became the first woman governor of the autonomous region.[1] She helped to negotiate some of the peace agreements after the conflict in Nicaragua, setting the stage for the Law of Autonomy of the Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities from the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua in 1987. She also helped to create the first autonomous regional government. She served as the Deputy of the Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic Coast in the National Assembly.
In 2010, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), awarded Cunningham an honorary doctorate. She was the first indigenous woman to receive an honorary degree from UNAM.
Cunningham was a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women and also advised the Alliance of Indigenous Women of Mexico and Central America, the Continental Network of Indigenous Women and the International Indigenous Women's Forum.
The NGO MADRE awarded Cunningham with the Woman of Distinction Award in 2012.
Bina D’Costa is a Peace and Conflict specialist and the Director of Studies, Department of International Relations in the Coral Bell School at the Australian National University. At the ANU she was previously a Fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Justice at RegNet (2008-10) and Convener of the Bachelor Program in Security Analysis with the Faculty of Asian Studies (2006-11). Bina has held visiting fellowships at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva (2012-14); the Refugee Studies Center, Oxford University (2011-12) and the Global Justice Center, New York (2008). Bina is currently finishing a book with John Braithwaite titled 'Cascades of Violence in South Asia’. She is the author of Marginalistation and Impunity: Violence against Women and Girls in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTC and IWGIA, 2014, Bengali translation 2016); Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia (Routledge, 2011 and 2013); Children and Global Conflict (co-authored, Cambridge University Press, 2015); Children and Violence: The Politics of Conflict in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and co-editor of Gender and the Global Politics of the Asia-Pacific (Palgrave, 2010). Bina has contributed to various projects in Bangladesh, Burma/Myanmar, India, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Thailand; and has worked in academia, NGOs and for governments in Australia and the UK. She serves on the editorial board of the International Journal for Transitional Justice and the International Journal of Feminist Politics. Bina is also on the UNDP Gender, Crisis Prevention and Recovery expert panel and an Advisory Council member of its newly formed International Center for Gender, Peace and Security.
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 Sami Parliament in Sweden. Baer has been engaged in the Sami 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 Sami representative in Swedish official delegations in different UN, European Union and other regional and international events. He has been the president of the Sami Parliamentary Council (the highest body in co-operation between the Sami 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 Sami (the main Sami 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 Visiting Professor (Modern International Relations and International Law) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is Council Member and Executive President of Kreddha: International Peace Council for States, Peoples and Minorities, an international non-governmental organisation created to help prevent and resolve violent intrastate conflicts. From 1984 Michael has served as the Legal Advisor to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He also served as Senior Legal Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Second Transitional Government of East Timor, UNTAET (2001-02); was a Member of the Netherlands Development Assistance Research Council (RAWOO), an advisory body of the Netherlands government where he chaired the committee on post armed conflict and peace consolidation (1997-2007). He co-founded and served as the General Secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) (1991-1998). Michael has been published widely on various social, political and legal issues.
Khushi Kabir is the Coordinator of Nijera Kori. In 1972, immediately after Liberation of Bangladesh, joined BRAC and was the first woman to be based in the field. In 1980 joined Nijera Kori as Coordinator a national level NGO working with rural women and men. Nijera Kori believes in creating strong autonomous organizations of the rural poor to assert their rights and ensure their entitlements as citizens. Is passionately involved in promoting gender equality, rights of women, indigenous peoples and other marginalised communities; land and water rights, secularism, environmental justice, food sovereignty, ensuring democratic values and accountability at all levels. Active in Public Interest Litigations, protecting landless and slum dwellers from eviction, preventing transformation of agriculture land to shrimp farms, use of fatwa, violence against women, extra judicial killings etc.
Tone Bleie holds degrees in Anthropology, based on studies of majority-minority relations in Bangladesh in the 1980s. Dr. Bleie has throughout her career shifted between applied research, aid administration and human rights advocacy. For 22 years, Dr. Bleie was a staff member at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (in Bergen, Norway). In the early 1990s, Bleie was the Dy. Regional Director of Save the Children Norway in SA. She returned to Bangladesh in the latter half of the 1990s when she headed an action research and advocacy project, involving local NGOs and indigenous rural youths from Rajshahi Division. From 2004 to 2006 Bleie was the Chief of Gender and Development in Unescap. Bleie is the outgoing Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at University of Troms (UiT), located in Sapmi. Bleie has been the Chair of the Forum for Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples (with secretariat at UiT) and she has served as an expert on various government appointed commissions and international boards. Bleie has recently served as a Senior Expert at the secretariat (in NY) of the UN organizations engaged in peace building. She is currently Professor of Public Planning and Cultural Understanding and will in 2013 be a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, affiliated with at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Bleie has written extensively on human rights, development, environmental change, peace and conflict in Asia.
Hurst Hannum is Professor of International Law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (USA). He has served as counsel in cases before the European Court and Inter American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations, and he has served on the boards of several international human rights organizations (Amnesty International USA, Survival International USA, and currently Minority Rights Group International). He was a consultant to the United Nations on East Timor and Western Sahara and is author/editor of OHCHR’s United Nations Guide to Minority Rights. Professor Hannum has published widely on human rights law and practice, including International Human Rights: Problems of Law, Policy, and Practice (5th ed. 2011) [with Anaya and Shelton]; Guide to International Human Rights Practice (4th ed. 2004); Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights (rev. ed. 1996); “The Concept and Definition of Minorities,” in Universal Minority Rights (Weller, ed., 2007); “Indigenous Rights,” in International Human Rights in the 21st Century: Protecting the Rights of Groups (Lyons and Mayall, eds., 2003); “The Protection of Indigenous Rights in the Inter American System,” in The Inter American System of Human Rights (Harris and Livingstone, eds.,1998); and “Sovereignty and Its Relevance to Native Americans in the Twenty First Century,” 23 Am. Indian L. Rev. 1 (no. 2, 1999).
Yasmeen Haque, a Ph.D holder in Physics from the University of Washington, USA, is currently a professor at the department of Physics and also the acting Dean at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST). She has served for several years as a Research and Teaching Assistant in the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at University of Washington before returning to Bangladesh. Her works and researches which were mostly based on Physics were recognized and published in journals at national and international level. She is also the founder member of the Governing Body of the University School in 2000. She is also a member of the national ICT taskforce. Yasmeen Haque has throughout her career worked as a social and human rights activist.