2025 speakers panel 
2025 speakers will be listed soon.

​2024 speakers:
Lukshmee Saravanapavan

Lukshmee Saravanapavan is a PhD candidate conducting research on socio-environmental justice driven community conflicts against the extractive industry. Growing up in Sri Lanka and witnessing the hardships faced by her Tamil community during the civil war inspired her focus to work in sustainable development; she holds experience engaging on this topic across sectors ranging from sustainable investing in financial firms to research in government and multilateral agencies in USA and Sri Lanka. Lukshmee’s active engagement with human rights campaigns began during her undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, where she served as Publicity and Public Relations Chair for student organizations such as Amnesty International UChicago and the Partnership for Advancement of Refugee Rights. Since then she has participated as a speaker for Amnesty International USA, addressing multiple issues such as media freedom and gender equality in Sri Lanka.
Jayaprakash S. Tissainayagam

This year’s speaker on Sri Lanka’s mass graves is Jayaprakash S. Tissainayagam. Tissa, as he is known, is closely associated with Amnesty Group 133 and Amnesty International. He was unjustly imprisoned by Sri Lanka between 2008 and 2010 for writing critically of the government’s handling of the civil war against its Tamil citizens. Tissa was the focus of the Get on the Bus campaigns of 2008, 2009 and 2010 and designated ‘prisoner of conscience’ by Amnesty International.

Tissa was charged under the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and was convicted for 20 years after a sham trial. Due to international pressure on the Sri Lanka government, the then president released him after which he fled to the United States where he now lives.

In the U.S., Tissa continues to lobby for justice, accountability, and human rights. His articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and International Policy Digest among others, and he has been interviewed by the BBC and the podcast Global Dispatches. In 2018, he testified on Sri Lanka before the Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations  of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.      
Yousuf Abdelfatah

Yousuf Abdelfatah is the Casework Officer at the Middle East Democracy Center where he works on documenting cases of unjust detention in the Middle East, working with the family members and loved ones of individuals impacted by carceral violence, and advocating for their release. He is also pursuing a PhD in the Department of Politics at Princeton University with a regional focus on in the Middle East and North Africa. Substantively his academic work focuses on state violence, repression, and civil society.
 Picture
Shahin Milani 

Shahin Milani is the Executive Director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. He obtained his J.D. from Howard University School of Law and his LL.M. from Vermont Law School. Shahin Milani is the principal author of several IHRDC reports, including Denied Identity: Human Rights Abuses against Iran’s LGBT Community, Apostasy in the Islamic Republic of Iran,  Controlled and Pursued: Labor Activism in Contemporary Iran, Extreme Inequality: The Human Rights Situation of Iran’s Baluch Minority, and Access to Justice for Victims of Sexual Violence in Iran.
 Picture
Dr. Sara Seck

Dr Seck is the Yogis & Keddy Chair in Human Rights Law and Director of the Marine & Environmental Law Institute (MELAW) at Dalhousie University, Canada. Her research and teaching contributions focus on the relationship between international human rights law, environment, and business law, with attention to the rights of local and Indigenous communities, and global south perspectives on sustainable development. She's a founding member of the Editorial Board of the Business and Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press), and active as a researcher and teacher on business and human rights issues with an environmental dimension, recently developing trainings for the United Nations Environment Programme on a human rights-based approach to the plastics value chain. Dr. Seck has researched and published extensively on home state duties and business responsibilities in the extractive industries context. More recently, she's considered how lessons from this research, as well as insights from feminist and relational theorists, must inform approaches to environmental and climate justice.
 Picture
​
Tenzin Yonten

Tenzin Yonten is president of Students for a Free Tibet - La Salle Academy, as well as a board member of Students for a Free Tibet - New York/New Jersey. His journey in activism for Tibet began before he was even born when his grandparents made the nearly impossible escape from Tibet into India due to the Chinese government's brutal occupation of Tibet. He was a participant in the Campaigns Track for SFT's 2023 Cross-Movement Action Camp, which united Tibetan, Uyghur, Hong Konger, Taiwanese, and allied youth activists for a week of intensive training and mobilization for human rights for all those resisting Chinese occupation. This March, Yonten spent two days on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. speaking with United States Representatives and Senators about taking action for Tibet.
 Picture