Sheila Paylan is an international human rights advocate and war crimes investigator with nearly 20 years of experience advancing accountability, the rule of law, and survivor-centered justice in conflict and post-conflict settings. As a legal advisor to the United Nations, she has worked across multiple regions on international criminal law, gender-based violence, and mainstreaming human rights in policy and practice.
John DiPirro is a foreign policy expert with over 15 years of experience leading international development programs, with a focus on democracy, human rights, and governance across the Eurasia region. He is currently a Senior Fellow for Eurasia with the American Foreign Policy Council and its Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, where he publishes research on political strategy, regional security, and geoeconomics.
Rusudan Shelia is a journalist with 16 years of experience, based in Washington, DC since 2022. In 2023, she founded Globalnews Georgia, a media outlet focused on Georgia–US relations and the South Caucasus. Her work centers on Georgia’s domestic and foreign affairs, with a strong emphasis on security and geopolitical dynamics.
In the last seven years, Philip Obaji has documented up to 100 human rights abuses and exploitation by Russian paramilitaries deployed in West and Central Africa. He has investigated and reported gut-wrenching massacres, rape, torture and oppression of vulnerable villagers by mercenaries from the Wagner Group and its successor, the Africa Corps, in the Central African Republic (CAR) and in Mali, despite threats in an incredibly risky context including being held hostage by CAR rebels and detained by CAR soldiers who tortured him on the orders of Russian paramilitaries.
Viktoria Maladaeva is an Indigenous Buryat human rights defender from the Republic of Buryatia and the founder of the Indigenous of Russia Foundation. She has organized anti-war protests, Indigenous conferences in Berlin and New York and produced documentaries about the legacy of residential schools for Indigenous kids in Russia and intersectional struggle of I Diogenes queers.
Dr. Yelda Karadağ Şir is an academic specializing in Europeanization, EU neighborhood policies, foreign policy analysis, and regionalism in the post-Soviet space, with a particular focus on the South Caucasus and the Black Sea region. She holds a PhD in Area Studies from Middle East Technical University (METU), where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the institutional and ideational construction of Georgia’s Europeanization.
Anastasiya Donets is the Team Lead of the Ukraine Legal Team at the International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR), where she leads strategic litigation and corporate accountability work related to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She joined IPHR in 2021 and assumed leadership of the Ukraine Legal Team in 2024, focusing on the documentation, reporting, and atrocity crime case building for international judicial and quasi-judicial mechanisms.
See full bio