Elena López Ruf is a lawyer. She graduated from the Faculty of Law of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) where she teaches Philosophy of Law, and she is currently pursuing a doctorate degree in law. She coordinates the program Religion and Development of CREAS (Regional Ecumenical Center). Previously, she served for four years as advisor at the Religious Affairs office of the government of Buenos Aires City. She is a member of the Youth Group of Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI) and of the Argentine Council for Religious Freedom (CALIR). In 2015, she participated in Summer School Religions in the Global World, promoted by Sophia University Institute, and in 2009 attended the Jewish-Catholic Emerging Leadership Conference in Rome, organized by the Commission of Religious Relations for the Jews of the Holy See and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC). She has been involved in interreligious and ecumenical initiatives for more than ten years, particularly with the youth of the Focolare Movement, and has published a number of journal articles on human rights law and religious freedom.
Renae Barker graduated from Murdoch University with a bachelor’s degree in law with honours and a bachelor’s degree in economics. She subsequently completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia in 2014. She joined UWA as a lecturer in 2013, having tutored at the university for a number of years prior. Renae researches in the area of law and religion. Her particular areas of interest are religion and education, freedom of religion, and state funding of religion. Her current research focuses on the engagement of Muslims in the common law legal system. This includes the issue of the wearing of Islamic face veils (burqa and niqab) by witnesses and other participants in the court process. Renae’s PhD thesis was titled The changing relationship between the State and religion in Australia: 1788 to modern Australia. What has changed? What is the same? And what does that tell us? It covered state restrictions on religious practice, religion and education and state funding of religion.
Joshua Roose is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Religion, Politics and Society at the Australian Catholic University. His primary research interests include law and religion, legal pluralism, political violence and political Islam. Joshua has previously been a visiting scholar at the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School and the Hagop Kevorkian Centre for Near Eastern Studies at NYU. He an editor of the Journal of Sociology and was an associate editor of the legal theory section of the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2018). Joshua’s current research focus is on the tension between the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation (Confession) and State laws requiring mandatory reporting of childhood sexual abuse or neglect in the context of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Childhood Sexual Abuse. He is particularly interested in the implications for freedom of religion resulting from these tensions.
Jeroen is a PhD Student in empirical and comparative religious studies at Radboud University (The Netherlands) since 2016. In 2012 he obtained his master’s degree in theology and religious studies at KU Leuven (Belgium). Two years later, he finished both his advanced master’s in theology and religious studies and a master’s in society, law, and religion. Jeroen’s PhD is titled State without religion? Perceptions of young Christians, Muslims and Humanists on religion-state relationships. It explores the different ways in which young, committed Christians, Muslims, and Humanists in the Netherlands and Flanders perceive the ideal relationship between religion and state governance. He is supervised by Dr. Carl Sterkens, Prof. Dr. Eric Vanbrux & Prof. Dr. Sophie van Bijsterveld.
Rodrigo Vitorino Souza Alves is a member of the Faculty of Law of Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, the Federal University of Uberlandia (Brazil) and the Leading Researcher of the Brazilian Center for Studies in Law and Religion. He is a researcher at the Ratio Legis - Center for Legal Research and Development of the Autonomous University of Lisbon on the topic religious freedom, social tension and security, and was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford (2014-2015). At the United Nations Office at Geneva he served as guest speaker at the Sixth Session of the Forum on Minority Issues on Beyond Freedom of Religion or Belief: Guaranteeing the Rights of Religious Minorities (OHCHR), which led to the publication of a set of recommendations by the Human Rights Council. He sits at the International Academic Advisory Board of the Advanced Program on Religion and the Rule of Law at Oxford and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Series Law and Religion in a Global Context, published by Springer, and the editor of the book Latin American Perspectives on Law and Religion. He was a member of the Expert Advisory Group for the International Development of Law Organization (IDLO) study on freedom of religion or belief.
Yuan Zhang is an associate professor and the Director of the Religion in the Middle East Research Program at the Middle East Studies Institute of Shanghai International Studies University. She is also an adjunct research fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and China’s National Security at Fudan University. She has a PhD in International Politics.
Dr. Zhang Zheng earned his PhD from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Law, and wrote his dissertation on the various paradigms of rule of law as they are applied to religious freedom and the use of these conceptual tools to analyze the regulatory framework of China’s public policy on religion. Dr. Zhang published several articles in Chinese journals about religious education, the constitutional arrangement of religious liberty in ancient China, tax issues of non-profit organizations, and political philosophy in general. Dr. Zhang worked for an NGO in Beijing focusing on law and development in China after he graduated from the LLM program at Columbia Law School. He served as a constitutional fellow for several months in early 2013 at ICLRS. He is now a partner in Pushi Law Firm in Shanghai and is doing research on law and religion.
M. Mohsin Alam Bhat is a law professor at Jindal Global Law School in Sonipat, Haryana. He studied at Yale University and received a JSD and an LLM. He has also been a research assistant for the UN for India.
Gde Metera is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Northwestern University. He is also an Arryman Scholar at the Equality, Development, and Globalization Studies (EDGS), the Buffet Institute of International Studies, Northwestern University. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of state policies on religion. https://metera.weebly.com/
Michelle is an Irish barrister with twelve years of experience working within domestic and international courts, including judicial support roles with members of the judiciary of Ireland, the ECtHR, the CJEU, and Zambia. She graduated with a first-class honors Bachelor of Laws from the National University of Ireland, Galway, as the McCarthy Scholar from the Honorable Society of King’s Inns, and in first place with an LLM in International and European Public Law from KU Leuven, Belgium. A former member of the academic staff at the Faculty of Law at KU Leuven, Michelle is currently a research fellow at the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Michelle is a visiting researcher at Yale Law School for spring term 2019. Her doctoral research focuses on judicial attitudes in Ireland, the UK, and the US towards religious laws.
Dr. Ross Holder is an adjunct lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin. His research and teaching interests center on the intersection of international human rights law and religion in Asia. Dr. Holder also acts as coordinator for the Trinity Human Rights and Religions Summer School (rightsandreligions.org), and has been involved in an advocacy capacity with a number of human rights NGOs including Amnesty International, Frontline Defenders and the Scholars at Risk Network on issues relating to academic freedoms, migrant rights, and freedom of religion or belief.
Tania Pagotto holds a PhD in Constitutional and Public Comparative Law (Venice-Göttingen), and LLM in Law (University of Padua). She was a doctoral fellow in the Department of Ethics, Law, and Politics at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnity Diversity. She spent a period of research at the Centre of Law and Religion in Cardiff (2014-15) and at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels (2012-13, LLP-Erasmus). Her scientific interests lie in the field of fundamental freedoms, with emphasis on freedom of conscience and religion, health and biolaw and discrimination.
Greg Marcar is a postdoctoral research affiliate at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI), University of Otago. Prior to completing his PhD in theology and law at University of Otago, Greg was involved in several non-profit organisations, including the Red Cross, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, International Bridges to Justice, Liberty, and the Innocence Project New Zealand. His previous publications discuss the theologies of Thomas Aquinas and Søren Kierkegaard, as well as the moral anthropology of U.S. capital punishment. Greg’s current research interests include issues of freedom of religion and conscience, equality and non-discrimination, and criminal justice.
Azizat O. Amoloye-Adebayo holds an LLB degree in Common and Islamic Law from Usmanu Dan Fodiyo University, Sokoto and an LLM degree from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan. She also holds a PhD degree in Sharī‘ah and International Human Rights Law from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. She is a senior lecturer and the Postgraduate Programmes Coordinator in the Department of Islamic Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ilorin, Ilorin. She is a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, a Commonwealth Scholar and an associate of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, Nigeria, and United Kingdom. Her research interests and areas of publication are Sharī‘ah and International Human Rights Law; Human Rights violations, Islamic Law of Inheritance and Islamic Family Law; Issues in Law and Religion; Gender Issues in Law; Feminist theories and Islam. She has contributed chapters in edited volumes such as - Judicial Dialogue and Human, Cambridge University Press (2017).
Elena Markova graduated from the Law Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2006 (diploma cum laude). In 2009 after her postgraduate program, she became a research fellow (lecturer) in the Constitutional and Municipal Law Department. She leads the seminars on Theory of Constitutional Law and Russian Constitutional Law and also teaches the course Religion and Law: Constitutional Problems. Elena is a team advisor of several moot courts in human rights including the International Moot Court Competition in Law and Religion, and a supervisor of the discussion club on law and religion. Elena is the author of a number of publications in Russian on the problems of freedom of religion restriction in comparative context. She works also as Deputy Editor-in-chief of the Journal Constitutional and Municipal Law. She is one of the founders of the Russian Interregional Association of Constitutionalists (IAC) and now works there as a secretary-general.
Maksym Vasin is Executive Director of the Institute for Religious Freedom NGO, Ukraine. He has a Master of Laws (LLM). Since 2015 Maksym is a member of the Expert Council on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations’ Activity under the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. In 2014 – 2017 he was engaged by OSCE ODIHR and the Council of Europe as a national expert conducting human rights training seminars. As a consultant of the Ukrainian Parliament, Maksym is a co-author of more than a dozen draft laws on freedom of religion or belief, including the issues of registration, legal status, and social activity of religious organizations. He has been working on FoRB advocacy and facilitation of interfaith dialogue since 2001. His PhD research covers the issues of constitutional and legislative regulation of the Church-State interaction, the legal status of religious organizations, and their role in social development as a part of civil society.