Avril Benoît is the executive director of Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières in the US, based in New York City. She has worked with the international medical humanitarian organization since 2006 in various operational management and executive leadership roles, most recently as the director of communications and development at MSF’s operational center in Geneva. Throughout her career with MSF, Avril has contributed to major movement-wide initiatives, including the global mobilization to end attacks on hospitals and health workers. She has worked as a country director and project coordinator for MSF, leading operations to provide aid to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Mauritania, South Sudan, and South Africa.

Prior to joining MSF, Avril had a distinguished 20-year career as an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in Canada, reporting from Kenya, Burundi, India and Brazil on HIV stigma, rapid urbanization, sexual violence in conflict, and political inclusion of women, among numerous other assignments and topics.

Bidisha Mamata is a broadcaster, journalist and multimedia artist. She specialises in international human rights, social justice and the arts and offers political analysis, arts critique and cultural diplomacy tying these interests together. She writes for the main UK broadsheets and presents and commentates heavily for BBC TV and radio, ITN, CNN, ViacomCBS and Sky News. Her fifth book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015), is based on her outreach work in UK prisons, refugee charities and detention centres. Her first short film, An Impossible Poison, received its London premier in 2018 and has been highly acclaimed and selected for numerous international film festivals. Her latest film series, Aurora, launched in 2020 and is ongoing. She is currently presenting the Hello Happiness audio series for Wellcome Collection, all about mental and physical health.

Befekadu Hailu Techane is a civil society leader, author and an advocate for the respect of human rights democracy in Ethiopia. He is co-founder and Executive Director at the Center for Advancement of Rights and Democracy (CARD), an Ethiopian civil society organisation. Prior to establishing CARD in 2019, Befekadu worked as an independent writer and activist for sociopolitical rights. He was a co-founder of the renowned Zone 9 Blogging and Activism Collective, served as an editor and opinion writer for many local print media outlets and is a weekly contributor to Deutsche Welle (Amharic Service). He was imprisoned in Ethiopia for his human rights activism in 2014 and again in 2016 but acquitted both times.

Befekadu’s work has been recognised through several human rights awards including a PEN Pinter Prize for International Writer of Courage, a Sakharov Fellowship from the European Parliament and a Freedom Fellowship from the Human Rights Foundation.