David Banisar is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Law, University of Leeds, and Director of the Freedom of Information Project of Privacy International in London.
Previously he was a Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and co-founder and Policy Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
He has also served as an advisor and consultant to numerous organizations including the Representative on Freedom of the Media for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Justice Canada, the Open Society Institute, Article XIX and Consumers International.
He has worked in the field of information policy for fifteen years and is the author of numerous books, studies, and articles on freedom of information, freedom of expression and privacy.
Prof. Johannes M M Chan, Dean, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong. A graduate of the University of Hong Kong and a Commonwealth Scholar, he obtained his LLM in the United Kingdom and specialised in human rights, constitutional and administrative law.He was called to the Hong Kong Bar in 1982 and has appeared as counsel in many leading Bill of Rights cases. Chan received the Human Rights Press Award in 1999.
His books include: On the Road to Justice (2000); Hong Kong’s Constitutional Debate: Conflict over Interpretation (with Yash Ghai and Fu Hualing, 2000); General Principles of Hong Kong Law (with Albert Chen and others, 1999) and Media Law and Practice (with Kenneth Leung, 1995).
D’ato Param Cumaraswamy, Malaysia, Barrister-at-law at Inner Temple, London. Since 1990, he has been a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists of which he was Vice-President between 2004 and May 2005.In 1994, he was appointed the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers by the UN Commission on Human Rights and served until 2003. He is also a member of the Regional Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism.
Param received the 2002 “Justice in the World Award” of the International Association of Judges. In 2003, he was called to the Bench of the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple in London as an Honorary Bencher.
In 2005 he received the 2005 Peter Gruber Foundation’s Justice Prize at Columbia University School of Law, New York.
Bambang Harymurti, is a leading Indonesian journalist and human rights activist. Since 1999, he has led Tempo weekly newsmagazine. Bambang is most famous for his struggle to fight criminal and civil libel charges filed by a powerful business tycoon with close ties to the police and military.A series of judicial irregularities resulted in Bambang being found guilty and sentenced to one year imprisonment in 2004. He was acquitted by the Indonesian Supreme Court in 2006. He obtained his Master of Public Administration degree from Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in 1991.
He has won numerous awards in journalism, including as co-winner of the 2005 Knight International Press Fellowship Award (with Marcelo Beraba from Brazil and Mahjoub Mohamed Salih from Sudan).
On February 9, 2007, President Yudhoyono signed a presidential decree and named Bambang as one of the nine members of the Indonesian Press Council.
Melinda Quintos De Jesus, founding member of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) and of the Freedom Fund for Filipino Journalists. She serves as the executive director of the private, non-profit Centre for Media Freedom & Responsibility (CMFR), which she organised to address the problems confronting the press in a developing democracy.Concurrently the publisher of the Centre’s publication, the Philippine Journalism Review, she has developed training programmes on media and the justice system, peace reporting, media and gender-based reporting and other merging issues in the news agenda.
In recognition of her efforts to strengthen Philippine democracy by promoting higher standards of media responsibility and professionalism, she received the Year 2000 Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. Fellowship for Professional Development.
