Global Dialogue on Decriminalisation, Choice and Consent
Organised by CREA
Supported by: Amnesty International
Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School
Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale Law School
Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy
22-24 October 2014
List of Participants and their Bios
Adrian Jjuuko, LLMserves as the Executive Director of Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum (HRAPF), an NGO providing legal aid services to LGBTI, sex workers and other marginalized groups in Uganda. Previously, Adrian was coordinator of the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law-Uganda, which won the US State Department’s Human Rights Defenders Award 2011 for its efforts to oppose the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. Adrian has been instrumental in bringing cases challenging the constitutionality of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, including Kasha Jacqueline & 2 Others v. The Rollingstone Publications (2010) and Jjuuko Adrian v. Attorney General of Uganda (2009).
Allan Achesa Maleche is a human rights lawyer who has been working in the field of HIV, TB law and human rights for the past seven years. As an Executive Director with Kelin, an award winning organization promoting and protecting HIV related Human rights in the Eastern Africa region, he is responsible for supervision, management and provision of strategic direction of the programmes undertaken by the organization. Before joining KELIN, Mr. Maleche worked as a litigation associate at the firm of Rachier & Amollo Advocates for a period of three years.
Allan Achesa Maleche has provided consultancy services to UNAIDS, UNDP, Action AID International and contributed working papers that were incorporated in the Global Commission Report on HIV and the Law. He has facilitated numerous trainings on legal, ethical and human rights issues relating to HIV & TB and was part of a consultancy team that developed the East African HIV and Management Bill 2010 that has since been signed by the Kenya, Uganda & Burundi heads of state. He continues to serve as a member of various renowned legal bodies including Law Society of Kenya and the East African Law Society. Mr. Maleche is the Alternate Board Member to the Developing Country NGO Delegation, Member of the Ethics Review Committee of Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital and a board member of African Sexworkers Alliance.
Alice Miller, JD, a scholar and advocate on the faculty of Yale University's School of Public Health and Jackson Institute for Global, and a spring Adjunct at Yale Law School. She co-Directs the Global Health Justice Partnership, a joint initiative of the Law and Public Health Schools. Previously, Miller taught at the UC Berkeley Law School as well as Columbia University, where she co-directed the Center (now Institute) for the Study of Human Rights and Master's Program in Human Rights jointly appointed to the Public Health and International and Public Affairs Schools. She teaches and writes in the areas of sexuality, rights, law, gender, health, and humanitarian issues. She combines extensive US and international advocacy experience with her academic work, specialising in developing a framework for human rights claims in the context of contemporary critical understandings of sexuality, law, and globalised advocacy networks.
Bishakha Dattawrites and films non-fiction, works on gender and sexuality, runs Point of View in Mumbai, is part of the wikipedia family and serves on several non-profit boards. She tweets @busydot and sometimes blogs at dizzybot. In all her avatars, Bishakha explores marginal, invisible, silenced points of view - or those considered illegitimate. She has edited two anthologies: And Who Will Make the Chapatis? (Stree, 1998) and Nine Degrees of Justice(Zubaan, 2010). Her filmography includes In The Flesh (2001), Taza Khabar (2005), Zinda Laash (2007) and Out of the Closet (2009). Her current interest lies in exploring how gender and sexuality intersect with digitality (eroticsindia.org) and with disability (sexualityanddisability.org). She is also writing #Selling Sex, a non-fiction book on the lives and realities of sex workers in India.
Carole S Vance,PhD, MPH, teaches anthropology, human rights, health and sexuality at Columbia University, where she founded and directed the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights. She has extensively written about sexual theory; trafficking; science, sexuality, gender, and health; and policy controversies about sexual expression and imagery. She is the editor ofPleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality(1982, 1993). She is the recipient of the David R Kessler Award for lifetime contribution to the study of sexuality (2005) and the Simon-Gagnon Award for career contributions to the study of sexualities (2014).
Elisa Leilani Slattery currently works as Senior Program Officer, Women's Rights Program, Open Society Foundations. Prior to this she was with the International Development Law Organization in the health law program and as a senior program coordinator of strategic initiatives. Previously, she was the Regional Director of the Africa program at the Center for Reproductive Rights where her work focused on promoting reproductive rights through national, regional, and international accountability mechanisms and addressing the intersection of HIV and reproductive rights. She has worked on fact-finding projects on abuses of women in health care facilities; discrimination against women living with HIV; mandatory pregnancy testing and expulsion of pregnant schoolgirls; and, the impact of restrictive abortion laws. She has also worked as a consultant on workers’ rights issues in Kenya, conducted comparative legal and human rights research on prisoners’ parental rights at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, and researched the impact of welfare reform on families with disabilities at the University of North Carolina Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. She received a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School anda Master of Arts in History from Duke University.
Geetanjali Misrais the Co-Founder and Executive Director of CREA. Geetahas worked at the activist, grant-making, and policy levels on issues of sexuality, reproductive health, gender, human rights, and violence against women. Before joining CREA, she was Program Officer Sexuality and Reproductive Healthfor the Ford Foundation in New Delhi and supported non-governmental organisations in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka working on sexual and reproductive health and rights. She also co-founded SAKHI for South Asian Women in New York in 1989, a non-profit organisation in New York, committed to ending violence against women of South Asian origin.Geeta is the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Mama Cash (The Netherlands); Board Member of Reproductive Health Matters (UK); and Member of the Expert Advisory Group of Cordaid (The Netherlands) and of the Advisory Board of FHI360 (US). She was President of the Board of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) from 2006–2008. She writes on issues of sexuality, gender, and rights, and has co-edited Sexuality, Gender, and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia.
Georges Azzihas been an activist for HIV prevention and sexual health since 2002. He is one of the founders of Helem, the first LGBT organization in the Arab world and has managed and coordinated Helem activities from 2004 to 2009. Georges is the Board member and co-founder of MARSA, the first comprehensive sexual health clinic in Lebanon. He is currently the Executive Director and Founder of the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality that works on building the capacity of activists working on gender and sexuality in the MENA, as well as offering security and protection programs for refugees and human rights defenders in the region.
Jaime Todd-Gher, LL.M, J.D. is a human rights lawyer specializing in issues of gender, sexuality and health. She currently works as a Human Rights Advisor with Amnesty International, where she is leading a project focusing on the human rights implications of punitive laws and policies regulating sexuality and reproduction. She has also worked as a Human Rights Advisor and Programme Officer with the WHO and UNAIDS, and a Global Advocacy Fellow with the Center for Reproductive Rights. Jaime engages in human rights litigation and advocacy before United Nations and regional human rights bodies and supports national-level advocacy strategies with partner organizations worldwide.
Leigh Ann van der Merwe is the Coordinator and Founder Social, Health and Empowerment Feminist Collective of Transgender and Intersex Women of Africa (S.H.E.) She is from Ugie, Eastern Cape of South Africa and grew up as a gender questioning person who struggled to conform to typical male gender codes. She enrolled for an LL.B degree with the University of the Western Cape in 2001 but did not complete due to financial difficulty. It was through another trans woman that Leigh Ann was introduced to trans activism in 2007. Her experience of activism includes being a candidate in the Transitioning Africa Exchange Program from 2010 to 2011. Leigh Ann has also been a fellow in the Open Society Transgender Center of Excellence Program in Salzburg, Austria during October 2011 and presented at a transgender consultation at UNAIDS in Geneva during November 2011. She holds a seat on the United Nations steering committee for transgender people in the Global South. Leigh Ann reviewed a number of gender literature resources produced by other NGO’s and was part of the study team on a UNFPA report on the challenges of sex workers in the East London area. She is actively involved with a number of NGO’s dealing with gender and women’s issues, HIV and public health.
Mindy Jane Rosemanis the Academic Director of the Human Rights Program (HRP) and a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She teaches courses on reproductive justice as well as gender and human rights. Before joining HRP, Roseman was an Instructor in the Department of Population and International Health at Harvard School of Public Health, and a Senior Research Officer at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard School of Public Health. Before coming to Harvard she had been a staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, in charge of its East and Central European program.
She is the co-author of “Sexual Rights at the UN: Frustration or Fulfillment” (with Alice M. Miller) Reproductive Health Matters 2011;19(38):102–118 and “Normalizing Sex and its Discontents: Establishing Sex in International Law,” (with Alice M. Miller) 34 Harvard
Journal of Law& Gender 2 (Summer 2011) and is currently co-editing a book “Beyond
Virtue and Vice: Criminal Law in the Regulation of Sex, Gender and Reproduction in the
Age of Human Rights” (forthcoming 2015). Her publications also includeReproductive
Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward (Laura Reichenbach, co-editor, University
of Pennsylvania Press 2009) Her current research projects include an assessment of international legal norms and their relationship to sexual health, and the effect litigation
has had on the implementation of the right to health.
Pooja Badarinath has worked in the women’s rights and sexual rights sector in India for the past six years, specifically on violence against women and gender discrimination, focusing on the implementation of laws relating to women and on law reform. Currently she is the Program Coordinator, Advocacy and Research at CREA. She is responsible for advocacy and research portfolio at CREA. She coordinates CREA’s national level advocacy on Violence against women, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and issues of sexual rights in India. She also leads on CREA’s advocacy at United Nations Human Rights Council on sexual rights and gender discrimination. A lawyer by training, she has been involved in conduction multi disciplinary analysis and research on impact of national and international laws and policies on women’s sexual health and rights on the lives of women and young girls. She holds a masters degree in Law (Human Rights)
Rupsa Mallikis Director, Programs and Innovation at CREA. She is responsible for developing and implementing CREA’s strategic initiatives and programmes in India, South Asia region and at the global level. Over a decade and a half, Rupsa has been engaged in advocating for sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender equity and justice in various capacities. This includes grant-making with the National Foundation for India; legislative and policy advocacy with the Centre for Health and Gender Equity in the US; and strengthening sexual and reproductive health, including abortion service delivery, in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan at the South Asia Régional Office of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Her publications include `Negative Choice’: Sex Determination and Sex Selective Abortion in India. (Mumbai, India: CEHAT/Healthwatch); Reproductive Technologies in India: Confronting Differences in Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies (New Delhi: The Sarai Program,CSDS, February, 2003); Sex Selection: A Gender Based Preference for a Pregnancy. Reproductive Health Matters, Volume 10, Number 19. (UK: Elsevier Science, May, 2002); A Less Valued Life: Population Policy and Sex Selection in India. (Takoma Park, MD: Center for Health and Gender Equity, October 2002). (With Jacobson, Jodi L.) The Far Right, Reproductive Rights, and U.S. International Assistance: The Untold Story Behind the Headlines. (Takoma Park, MD: Center for Health and Gender Equity, August 8, 2002). (Also republished in Seminar, Indian journal, December 2002). Rupsa holds a Masters degree in Women and Development from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands.
Sara Hossain is a barrister practicing in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, mainly in the areas of constitutional, public interest and family law. She currently serves pro bono as the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust ( She is involved with several human rights organisations, nationally and internationally, including Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), the Human Rights Committee of the International Law Association (ILA), the Advisory Committee of the Women’s International Coalition on Gender Justice (WICG) and is a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Sara earlier ran the South Asia Programme at INTERIGHTS from 1997 to 2003, and was a founding board member of the South Asia Women’s Fund (SAWF).
Sara’s casework on women’s rights at BLAST has included public interest litigation before the Supreme Court of Bangladesh challenging ‘fatwa’ violence (degrading punishments being imposed on women and girls accused of violating community norms on sexuality), ‘forced veiling’ and the use of the ‘two finger test’ as a form of medical evidence collection; and while at Interights, amicus/ third party briefs for constitutional litigation before the Supreme Court of Nepal in a case challenging marital rape as discrimination, and before the ECHR challenging the requirement of proof of force to establish rape (MC v Bulgaria)
Her publications include ‘Wayward Girls and Well-Wisher Parents: Habeas Corpus, Women’s Rights to Consent and the Bangladesh Courts” in Aisha Gill (ed) Forced Marriage (Zed, London 2010) and (Co-edited with Lynn Welchman) “Honour”: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women (Zed Books, London, 2005).
Sara was educated at Wadham College, Oxford (MA (Hons) 1988), called to the Bar from Middle Temple (1989), enrolled in the High Court Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh (1992) and then in the Appellate Division in 2008.
Shohini Ghoshis Sajjad Zaheer Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia University, India. She has been visiting professor at Cornell University, and a fellow at the University of Chicago. Ghosh directed Tales of the Nightfairies (2002), a film about the sex workers' struggle for rights in Kolkata, India. She is author of the volume on Deepa Mehta's Fire for the Queer Classics Series published by Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, Canada and Orient Paperbacks, Delhi, India. Ghosh is co-founder of the Mediastorm Collective, an all-women documentary collective. She researches and writes on film, television, speech, censorship and sexuality. Her current work is titled Violence and the Outsider: Bombay Cinema and the Spectre of the Muslim.
Sonia Corrêa has a degree in Architecture and a post-grade in Anthropology. From the 1970´s on she has been involved in research and advocacy activities related to gender equality, health and sexuality. Since 2002 with Richard Parker, she co-chairs Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW. She has extensively published in Portuguese and English. This list includes, among other, Population and Reproductive Rights: Feminist Perspectives from the South (Zed Books, 1994) and Sexuality, Health and Human Rights co-authored with Richard Parker and Rosalind Petchesky (Routledge, 2008). She has also lectured in various academic institutions.
Sylvia Tamale is a leading African feminist lawyer and scholar based in Kampala, Uganda. She holds a Bachelor of Laws from Makerere University, a Masters in Law from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. In Sociology and Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Sylvia teaches law at Makerere University where she served as Law Dean