Yasmine Ergas is the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of International and Public Affairs. A practicing lawyer and social scientist, Ergas has been engaged in the Millenium Villages Project as coordinator and special advisor on gender issues, served as a consultant to private corporations, international organizations and governmental entities and been active in several nonprofit organizations. Her research interests focus on international law and domestic public policy, women’s rights, the redefinition of national sovereignty and the intersections of corporate law, international law and human rights.

A former member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, Ergas has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation and the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and has been a research associate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and the Pembroke Center at Brown University. The international organizations to which she has served as a consultant include the OECD, WHO and UNESCO. From 1985 to 1991, Ergas was on the staff of the Social Science Research Council where, among other responsibilities, she led the initiative to establish a program on the social consequences of the AIDS epidemic and staffed the Committee on Western Europe. As a member of the Committee on International Trade of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Ergas led a project on child labor and international trade. She has also served on the Committee on World Sociology of the American Sociological Association and the international Research Planning Group on Gender Politics and Public Policies established by the Council for European Studies. Ergas' numerous publications include “Nelle maglie della politica” (Milan: 1986); “The Subject of Women” in M.Perrot and G.Duby (general editors) “A History of Women” (Cambridge: 1994); and “Child Care Policies in Comparative Perspective” in OECD, “Lone Parents: The Economic Challenge” (Paris: 1990). Her essays have been translated into several languages including Portuguese, Japanese, French and German and been published in all the relevant countries as well as India. She has delivered invited lectures in numerous universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Cornell, Naples, Rome, Milan, Bocconi, and, most recently, Amherst. She has also participated in many conferences and delivered the keynote address at a meeting of the Italian Sociological Association.

Ergas holds degrees in Sociology from the Universities of Sussex and Rome and a J.D. from Columbia University. At Columbia Law School, she also earned a Certificate of Achievement with Honors from the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law and served as an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review. Ergas has practiced law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, LLP and Studio Legale Pedersoli of Milan. She is on the Board of NYC Global Partners and chairs the advocacy subcommittee of the New York Committee of Human Rights Watch.

Tenured at the Department of History John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, Prof. Itai Sneh completed his doctoral studies at Columbia University. He also holds a law degree and a Masters in Eastern European Jewish History from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a B.A. in Jewish History (with minors in International Relations, Biblical Studies and Yiddish Language and Culture) from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. His research interests, presentations and publications include articles and lectures on the history of human rights, U.S. politics, international law, American foreign policy, terrorism, genocide, the Vietnam War, and the Middle East. His first book was just published with Peter Lang Publishers is The Future Almost Arrived: Why Jimmy Carter Could Not Change U.S. Foreign Policy. His Torture Through the Ages is under contract with the Praeger division of Greenwod Press aided by a research grant from the Department of Homeland Security.

Deirdre Fottrell is a lecturer in international human rights law at the Human Rights Centre and in the Law Faculty of the University of Essex. She has taught this course at the University of Essex and the University of London. She has acted as an expert providing advice and training to international organisations including the Council of Europe and the OSCE and has conducted training of lawyers and judges throughout Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. She has participated in training for the British Foreign Office and for non governmental organisations including Amnesty International, JUSTICE, the AIRE centre and Interights.

She is the author of numerous books and publications on human rights generally and children's rights specifically, including the edited collection Revisiting Children's Rights: Ten Years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Kluwer 2000).

Joanne Bauer is a specialist in human rights, environmental issues, and international policy with regional expertise in Asia. From 1994 to 2005 she was Director of Studies at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs (New York), where she founded their programs in human rights and in environmental values. She was the Council’s Director of Japan Programs from 1991 to 1994 and before that held positions in banking, government affairs, and broadcast media. She is an independent consultant for human rights foundations and non-profits, and works with the London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Center as New York Representative and Senior Researcher, leading a project on the business response to HIV/AIDS globally.

Joanne has organized, led and spoken at workshops, panel discussions, and seminars in the US and abroad. At the Carnegie Council as Director of Studies, in addition to the above program areas, she developed and led the fellows program, which attracted each year over 350 applications for five to nine fellowships designed for early career scholars and mid-career professionals. She was the founder and editor of Human Rights Dialogue, a magazine published by the Carnegie Council from 1993-2005 that featured the perspectives of scholars, activists and other policy makers from around the globe working to put human rights theory into practice. She edited Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood and Contested Environments, published by ME Sharpe in 2006, that presents new case material on environmental politics researched and written by leading Japanese, American, Chinese and Indian scholars. She co-edited The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights published by Cambridge University Press in 1999 (currently in its fourth printing) that features original essays from philosopher Charles Taylor, human rights theorist Jack Donnelly, human rights legal scholar Abdullahi An-Naim, Nobel Prize Laureate Amartya Sen, and others. Ms. Bauer has served as a contributing editor to the journal Ethics & International Affairs, editor of Dialogue OnLine, the on-line companion to Human Rights Dialogue, and has authored numerous articles, reviews and reports.

Ms. Bauer has traveled widely to Asia, Europe and Latin America and speaks Japanese fluently. She earned her B.A. from Colgate University in 1984 and her M.A. in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in 1990.