Angela Bortel is a staff attorney with The Advocates for Human Rights Women’s Program. She received her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley - Boalt Hall.  She received a B.A. from Kalamazoo College, where she majored in political science and international and area studies with an emphasis on Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to law school, Ms. Bortel was a U.S. State Department/IREX Fellow in Moscow, where she attended Moscow State University and volunteered with numerous non-profit women's groups such the Angel Coalition, an anti-trafficking coalition. Her work in Russia included training women's groups, working with trafficking victims, authoring Moscow-Helsinki Group’s annual report on women and helping draft proposed anti-trafficking legislation. During law school, Ms. Bortel founded and oversaw a legal advocacy project at Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE) in San Francisco.  There she taught street law classes, advocated for clients, as well as led legal trainings for public prosecutors, district attorneys and international delegations on U.S. anti-trafficking law.  Ms. Bortel also clerked in the domestic violence program at Bay Area Legal Aid and served as a member of the Bay Area Anti-Trafficking Coalition.  After law school, she worked as an attorney at Kerosky and Associates in San Francisco, California, where she practiced immigration and general civil litigation. Ms. Bortel is admitted to practice in California (inactive) and Minnesota. 

Alena Chaps is a The Advocates for Human Rights Women’s Program Assistant in her second year with the St. Joseph Worker Program, a full-time volunteer program that supports women committed to social change. Last year as a St. Joseph Worker, she worked at Hope Community, Inc. with an English language learning program and an adult basic education program. She is also a founding member and organizer with SPEAC (Sustainable Progress through Engaging Active Citizens,) a collective of young adults who learn, train, and spread effective models of community organizing through the support of Hope Community. She holds a B.A. in Religious Studies and Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago.

Mary Ellingen is a Staff Attorney with The Advocates for Human Rights Women's Program.  She received her J.D. from   the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to joining the staff of The Advocates for Human Rights, Ms. Ellingen was a long-time volunteer for the organization and in this capacity she assisted in documenting and writing reports on Employment Discrimination and Sexual Harassment in Poland and The Government Response to Domestic Violence Against Refugee and Immigrant Women in the Minneapolis/St.Paul Metropolitan Area: A Human Rights Report. She is admitted to practice in  Minnesota.

Mark Girouard is an associate with the law firm of Halleland Lewis Nilan & Johnson who practices in the areas of commercial litigation, labor and employment, and appellate litigation. After completing an M.A. in Asian Studies at Stanford University in 1993, he worked for several years in the human rights field. He graduated cum laude in 2000 from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he participated as a director in the Phillip C. Jessup International Moot Court. A co-author of the Shadow Report discussed at the conference, he is a member of various state and local bar associations and remains active in the human rights field, and is a volunteer for The Advocates for Human Rights. 

Peggy Hicks, Global Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch, is responsible for coordinating HRW’s advocacy team and providing direction to HRW’s advocacy worldwide. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in January 2005, Ms. Hicks served as Director of the Office for Returns and Communities in the U.N. mission in Kosovo. She has worked previously as Director of Programs and General Counsel for the International Human Rights Law Group (now Global Rights), where she managed more than a dozen country programs. Before joining the Law Group, Ms. Hicks was the Deputy High Representative for Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the highest-ranking international official responsible for implementation of the human rights aspects of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Earlier, Ms. Hicks had worked as human rights advisor in the office of the U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the former Yugoslavia. She has acted as an expert consultant for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on numerous occasions, including advising on the establishment of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Ms. Hicks also served as clinical professor human rights and refugee law at the University of Minnesota Law School and as senior counsel at Dorsey & Whitney.  She actively participated in the work of Advocates for Human Rights while residing in Minnesota from 1987 to 1995, including by serving on its board and Executive Committee.  Ms. Hicks is a graduate of Columbia Law School and the University of Michigan.  For more information on Human Rights Watch visit http://www.hrw.org/.

Llewellyn Hille currently serves as the Minnesota Field Organizer for Oxfam America.  Prior to joining Oxfam America in 2007, he served for six years as the Texas-Oklahoma Regional Organizer for Bread for the World.  Prior to joining Bread for the World, LIwelleyn served for eleven years as Executive Director of Self-Help International in Waverly, Iowa. Self-Help, an ecumenical rural development and agricultural program, has projects in Ghana, West Africa, and Nicaragua.  He also served with the Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Cameroon, West Africa, from 1966 to 1977. Assignments included teaching and                administration of education programs.  From 1975 to 1977 he served as Secretary for Education for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon (ELCC).  In 1984 he returned to Africa where he served as Business Manager and Director for the ELCA Mission in Dakar, Senegal, until 1986. A major part of the work in Senegal was related to drought in the Sahel and humanitarian relief.  In addition, Llewellyn has worked on a variety of international projects which included assignments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, France and Israel and participated in several World Bank educational consulting assignments to Guinea, West Africa.  For more information on Oxfam America visit http://www.oxfamamerica.org/.

Linda Nielsen is an International Programs Clinical Consultant for the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT). Ms. Nielsen has worked at CVT since 1992. During the first fourteen years of her tenure, she provided psychological services to children, adolescents, and adult primary and secondary torture survivors; coordinated a Child Survivor Project; and led a multidisciplinary healing team in the Client Services Program. In her current position as International Services Clinical Consultant at CVT, she provides clinical oversight to the International Services Program sites (currently in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Democratic Republic of Congo) and supervision to its professional mental health staff; in addition, she serves as clinical consultant for the International Capacity Building Program. Privately she provides psychotherapy to adults, many of whom are survivors of abuse, neglect, and other traumatic life experiences. She received her Master of Social Work degree from the University of Illinois and a Post-Master’s Certificate in Psychodynamic Clinical Social Work from Tulane University.  For more information on the Center for Victims of Torture visit http://www.cvt.org/.

Robin Phillips is the Executive Director of The Advocates for Human Rights. She formerly served as the Director of the Women's Human Rights Program and the Deputy Director of the organization. She has written on a variety of topics related to women's human rights including trafficking in women, employment discrimination, sexual harassment and domestic violence. She has taught courses on women's international human rights at the University of Minnesota Law School and a general introduction to human rights at St. Thomas University Law School. Ms. Phillips has conducted fact-finding missions to document human rights violations in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Poland, Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. She has organized international conferences and trainings on human rights and NGO development issues. She also helped lead The Advocates' delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in September 1995. Prior to The Advocates, Ms. Phillips practiced law with the firm of Briggs and Morgan in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her law degree from Northwestern University School of Law and her B.A., magna cum laude, from  Pepperdine University.

Korir Sing’Oei is the Executive Director of the Centre for Minority Rights Development (CEMIRIDE), a non-profit organization that seeks the legal and political recognition of minorities and indigenous communities in Kenya and Greater Africa through strategic litigation, research, and frontline advocacy. Mr. Sing’Oei, an advocate of the High Court of Kenya, holds an LL.B degree and is an LL.M candidate at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has extensive experience in using international and regional human rights mechanisms to secure group rights for communities in Africa. During his fellowship year with the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs (2007-08), he focused on international human rights law, citizenship and migration issues, and also studied models on the promotion of diversity and inclusion of minorities in political processes. For more information on the CEMIRIDE visit www.cemiride.info/.

Willam F. Schulz.  From the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan, to the poorest villages in India; from the prison cells of Monrovia, Liberia, to the business suites of Hong Kong to Louisiana’s death row, Dr. William F. Schulz has traveled the globe in pursuit of a world free from human rights violations.  As Executive Director of Amnesty International USA from 1994-2006, Dr. Schulz headed the American section of the world’s oldest and largest international human rights organization. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he works in the area of religion and public policy and oversees a project designed to provide a blueprint for human rights policy for the next US administration.  During 2006-07 he served as a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and currently serves as a Presidential Fellow at Simmons College in Boston and an Adjunct Professor at the Wagner School of New York University.

During his twelve years at Amnesty, Dr. Schulz led missions to Liberia, Tunisia, Northern Ireland, and Sudan and visited other places as diverse as Cuba and Mongolia.  He was tailed by Tunisian secret police, threatened with assassination by Liberian warlord Charles Taylor and his appeal for reconciliation of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland brought tears to the eyes of then Prime Minister David Trimble.

He also traveled tens of thousands miles in the United States, spreading the human rights message from campuses to boardrooms to civic organizations.  A frequent guest on television programs such as Good Morning, America, The Today Show, Hardball and Nightline, Dr. Schulz is the author of two books on human rights, In Our Own Best Interest:  How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All (2001, Beacon Press) and Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights (2003, Nation Books); the contributing editor of The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (2007, University of Pennsylvania Press)and The Future of Human Rights: US Policy for a New Era (forthcoming 2008, University of Pennsylvania Press) and is regularly quoted in The New York Times and other national publications.  All of this prompted the New York Review of Books to say in 2002, “William Schulz…has done more than anyone in the American human rights movement to make human rights issues known in the United States.”  

An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, Dr. Schulz came to Amnesty after serving for fifteen years with the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), the last eight (1985-93) as President of the Association. As President, he led the first visit by a U. S. Member of Congress to post-revolutionary Romania in January, 1991, two weeks after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu.  That delegation was instrumental in the subsequent improvement in the rights of religious and ethnic minorities in Romania.

Dr. Schulz has served on the boards of People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the International Association for Religious Freedom, the world’s oldest international interfaith organization.  He is currently Chair of the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Schulz has received a wide variety of honors, including seven honorary degrees (University of Cincinnati, Grinnell College, Lewis & Clark College, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, Nova Southeastern University, Oberlin College, Willamette University), the Public Service Citation from the University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Oberlin College Alumni Association.  He has been included in Vanity Fair’s 2002 Hall of Fame of World Nongovernmental Organization Leaders and was named “Humanist of the Year” by the American Humanist Association in 2002.

Dr. Schulz is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oberlin College, holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago and the Doctor of Ministry degree from Meadville/Lombard Theological School (at the University of Chicago).  He is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the East..

Ahmed K. Sirleaf II is a Program Associate with The Advocates for Human Rights focused on coordinating community outreach for the Liberian Truth & Reconciliation Project.  A human rights advocate and scholar, Ahmed has a special interest in efforts to implement transitional justice initiatives in societies that have experienced severe violence. He holds an M.A. in International Law and the Settlement of Disputes from the University for Peace (United Nations mandated), San Jose, Costa Rica, and a B.A. in Legal Studies from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has studied at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York through New York University School of Law’s joint transitional justice Essentials Course training. Ahmed has served as guest lecturer and co-taught courses in Transitional Justice, International Human Rights and the international practice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis and Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has served as panelist, and presented scholarly papers on ADR and Transitional Justice before bodies and institutions such as the Minnesota State Bar Association’s ADR Section and the International Law Students’ Association’s 2006 Fall Conference at Hamline University School of Law.

Steve Suppan has been a policy analyst at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy since 1994.  Until 2000, his work focused on trade policy in Latin America, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement and the negotiations towards a Free Trade Area of the Americas.  Beginning in 2000, he became involved in consumer rights through representing Consumers International at the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the international food standards organization whose work is referenced as authoritative in the World Trade Organization agreement on trade related food safety and animal and plant health measures.  From 2001 to 2005, Suppan was the U.S. Trade Working Group co-chair of the TransAtlantic Consumers Dialogue, a network of more than 65 U.S. and European consumer and public interest organizations that meets annually with U.S. and European Commission officials.  He has written widely on trade policy and food safety issues, including recent articles in Trade Insight (Pakistan), Food Ethics (United Kingdom) and the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs (Tufts University).  Much of this writing is posted at www.tradeobservatory.org.

Thomas W. Tinkham is Partner and Chair of the Commercial Litigation practice group at Dorsey & Whitney LLP. He is recognized as one of the best business litigators in Minnesota, and has successfully litigated cases before the Minnesota     Supreme Court. Tinkham is an active member of the legal community, having received the Volunteer Lawyers Network “Lifetime Pro Bono Award” in 2000. For 25 years he has provided pro bono advice to low income clients at Volunteer     Lawyers Network clinics and has been on VLN’s board for over 30 years. In addition, he currently serves on the boards of The Fund for the Legal Aid Society and William Mitchell College of Law. Previously, he has served as a board or task force member of the Minnesota State Bar Association (President), the Hennepin County Bar Association (President), Minnesota Public Television, the Children’s Theatre, the Minneapolis Athletic Club, the Minnesota Gender Bias Task Force, The Hennepin County Mental Commitment Task Force, and the Hennepin County Juvenile Commitment Task Force. Tinkham received a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School and a B.S., With Honors, from the University of Wisconsin.