Scott Busby has spent more than 30 years working on human rights, refugee, and migration issues, serving in a variety of positions with the U.S. government and international organizations.

Scott has a distinguished career of public service in human rights. For the last decade, he has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. Department of State, where he has overseen at various times the bureau’s work on the East Asia and the Pacific region, Africa, the Western Hemisphere, multilateral issues, business and human rights, labor issues, and human rights-based sanctions.

Dr. Ioana Cismas is the Co-Director of the Centre for Applied Human Rights and a Reader at the York Law School, University of York (UK). She teaches, researches, and provides legal and policy advice in public international law, human rights law, international humanitarian law, law and religion, and transitional justice. Her research explores through doctrinal, socio-legal, interdisciplinary, and empirical methods, the intersections between legal accountability and legitimacy in relation to a variety of state and non-state actors.

Stephen Rickard has worked to advance human rights in Washington for more than three decades in senior positions in the United States Senate, the State Department, as Washington director for Amnesty International USA, director of the RFK Human Rights Center and director of the Washington office of the Open Society Foundations.

Diann Rust-Tierney is a national legal and legislative policy advocate with more than 40 years of experience developing, coordinating, and implementing policy and culture change to advance civil and human rights. She has led efforts to develop a coordinated state and federal strategy to reduce support for and end capital punishment in the US.