Franco Cavalli, M.D., F.R.C.P. (London), born 1942, is Scientific Director of the Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland (IOSI) which has its main location in Bellinzona (Switzerland), but connects all the public hospitals of the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. He has created this Institute, which encompasses medical oncology, radio-oncology, nuclear medicine, palliative care, hematology and an important research division. He is Professor (Titularprofessor) of medical oncology at the Medical Faculty in Bern (Switzerland). He has an international reputation for the treatment of and research into malignant lymphoma. He is also organizing every second year in Lugano the International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma, which is the most important congress on that topic worldwide. He has been very active also in the field of the clinical evaluation of new drugs. On that field he was chairman of the Early Clinical Trials Group of EORTC and created the SENDO (Southern Europe New Drug Organization), a conglomerate which includes IOSI and the main cancer institutes in Milan. The quality of his work has been recognized by the award of 21 national and international prices, including the Petzcoller award for special dedication to oncology and the Montaigne price. He has published more than 500 articles in peer-reviewed journals, has contributed to many books on cancer including the Textbook of Medical Oncology, which he is editing together with profs S. Kaye (London) and H.H. Hansen (Copenhagen).

He was Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Oncology, Europe’s premier medical oncology journal, from 1990 to 2000 and he is on the Editorial Board of several other journals. He has founded in 1996 the International Extranodal Lymphoma Study Group (IELSG, www.ielsg.org), which encompasses now more than 200 institutions in 4 continents. IELSG is the leading cooperative group in the field of the biological and clinical studies in the field of extranodal lymphomas.

Franco Cavalli has been President of the Swiss Cancer League and is Chairman of the scientific committee of the European School of Oncology (ESO). He has been president of the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) between 2006 and 2008.

He has been member of the Swiss Parliament between 1995 and 2007.

Law graduate from the University of Lausanne in 2006, Hüsnü Yilmaz worked for a Swiss trade-union in Geneva as well as for the service of legal affairs for Inclusion Handicap in the Swiss Romandie in Lausanne.

Following his articling in Lausanne, he became licensed attorney in 2012. Since then, he has opened his office and practices as an independent barrister.

Hüsnü Yilmaz was co-chairman of Progressive Lawyers in Vaud canton, he was member of the committee for Democratic Lawyers of Switzerland for several years. 

He is currently an individual member of the committee of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights.

In addition to his activity as a lawyer, Hüsnü Yilmaz is co-writer of two books in the field of social insurance law and labor law.

Licencié en droit à l’Université de Lausanne en 2006, Hüsnü Yilmaz a ensuite travaillé pour un syndicat suisse à Genève et pour le service juridique romand d’Inclusion Handicap à Lausanne.

Après son stage d’avocat à Lausanne, il a obtenu son brevet en 2012. Depuis lors, il a ouvert son étude et il exerce comme avocat indépendant.

Hüsnü Yilmaz a été co-président des Juristes progressistes vaudois, il a été membre durant plusieurs années du comité des Juristes Démocrates de Suisse.

Actuellement, il est toujours membre individuel du comité de l’Association européenne des juristes pour la démocratie et les droits de l’Homme.

Parallèlement à son activité d’avocat, Hüsnü Yilmaz a collaboré à la rédaction de deux ouvrages dans le domaine du droit des assurances sociales et du droit du travail.

Fatma Ozdemir is a Kurdish human rights lawyer from Turkey. She has previous experience as a practicing lawyer in Istanbul, as a consultant and representative of the Turkish People’s Democratic Party and as the co-chair of the Association of Lawyers for Freedom (OHD). She has provided legal consultancy on national and international human rights law dealing with the fundamental rights and group rights of imprisoned individuals and judicial proceedings for monitoring the European Court of Human Right’s judgment implementations. Through this experience, Ozdemir has worked closely alongside international human rights organisations and other related international actors. Ozdemir is an active contributor to various OHD’s published reports and research projects, which has allowed her to develop an understanding of an intersectional framework approach towards human rights violation cases; particularly cases relating to immunity and the appropriate punishment of perpetrators. Currently, she is pursuing her İnternational Humanitarian Law master program at the University of Essex.

Dr Darren Dinsmore in an Irish legal researcher who specialises in International Human Rights Law. Darren graduated with a Bachelor of Laws (Law and Government) from the University of Ulster in 2002 and a Master of Laws (Human Rights Law) from Queen’s University Belfast in 2005. He successfully completed his doctoral studies at Queen’s University Belfast in 2012 on the topic ‘Forced Movement and International Human Rights Law: A Case-Study of the ECHR in Turkey’. 

Darren has held teaching positions in the Law Schools at Queen’s University Belfast, Keele University and the University of Kent. He has undertaken legal training at Åbo Akademi University and the University of Cambridge and is completing a monograph on forced displacement in Turkey for Intersentia Publishing. His research interests include the historiography of human rights, gross and systematic violations of human rights, states of emergency and derogations, forced displacement, and political parties and free elections. 

Deniz Arbet Nejbir is a Kurdish human rights activist and lawyer. He is employed as an assistant professor at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law and a Legal Adviser for Mesopotamia Observatory of Justice, in Geneva (Switzerland) since September 2018.

He received a full scholarship from both Ruskin College, Oxford and the University of Warwick to pursue his undergraduate law degree. Prior to commencing his PhD at Queen’s University, he obtained an advanced master’s degree (LLM) in International and European Law with distinction from Vrije Universiteit Brussels, where he was awarded a full scholarship. He graduated from DEL funded PhD in December 2019, with very minor corrections. His PhD thesis entitled “The Treatment of the Kurds and the Kurdish Language by the Turkish State,” generates a new theoretical approach to the examination of the suppression of the Kurds and Kurdish language in Turkey by providing unprecedented examination of Turkey’s systematic Kurdish annihilation policy under international European human rights law and minority law and international criminal law, namely crimes against humanity and cultural and linguistic genocide.

His PhD thesis makes an original contribution to Kurdish studies on Turkey and it is such high quality that it was subsequently awarded a book contract by the prestigious publishing house Routledge. The book is due to be published in 2022. His scholarship is not only based on extensive study and documentary research, but also on my long-standing working experience in the field of human rights and international law. He has a wealth of practical experience in representing human rights victims and advocating on their behalf in various UK and international institutions, including the Immigration and Asylum Tribunals, Interpol, the United Nations Human Rights Committees and European Court of Human Rights. His academic background and practical experience provided him with a broad knowledge of international and European human rights law, international criminal law and an in-depth understanding of international humanitarian law, crimes against humanity, cultural genocide, minority rights and the Kurdish conflict in Turkey.

Rüstü Demirkaya is working as a journalist/reporter since 2002. Between 2002-2009, he worked for DIHA News Agency and Özgür Gündem newspaper as a reporter and editor. Received his BA in International Relations from the Global Studies Institute at the University of Geneva, Demirkaya is a Master's student in Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Geneva and also continues to work as a correspondent for the MA News Agency from Geneva. He is active in different institutions and organizations, working in the field of minority and refugee rights. He is also a member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the Media and Communication Union (Syndicom) and the Association of Accredited Correspondents at the United Nations (ACANU).