Lucas Ferraz is secretary of foreign trade at the Brazilian Ministry of Economy. He is an engineer and holds a PhD in economics from Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo. He was a senior consultant in international trade for the World Bank and UNCTAD and is one of the coordinators of the Brazilian Chair at the World Trade Organization.

Rob Strayer serves as the executive vice president of policy at the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). He leads ITI’s efforts to shape technology policy around the globe to enable innovation, competition, and economic growth, while supporting governments efforts to achieve their public policy objectives.

Ambassador Julio Fiol is the ambassador of Chile in Japan. He graduated from the diplomatic academy. He is a lawyer with a degree in legal and social sciences from the University of Chile. As a foreign service official, he has served in Chilean missions to the United Nations, Italy, Miami, Mexico, New York, and Washington DC.

Ambassador Márcia Donner Abreu holds a B.A. in law from Cândido Mendes College and postgraduate degrees in Development from the Institut Universitaire d'Etudes du Développement and in international law from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, both in Geneva. She joined the Rio Branco Institute in 1986. At the foreign ministry’s headquarters in Brasília, she has worked in the areas of environment, trade service negotiations, and Mercosur extra-regional negotiations.

Ambassador Teiji Hayashi holds a bachelor of public law from Tokyo University and a master of arts in European studies from Universidad Politechnica de Madrid. Mr. Hayashi is currently the assistant minister in the Latin American and Caribbean Affairs Bureau office at the Foreign Ministry of Japan.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner joined Human Rights Watch as a fellow in September 2005. After a year, she became HRW’s Mexico researcher (2006-2009), and is currently acting deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas Division, covering several countries in the region. She has been covering Venezuela for the organization for over a decade.

Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian (Venezuelan-American) is Director of the Department of Social Inclusion of the Secretariat for Access to Rights and Equity at the Organization of American States (OAS), where she is responsible for directing the work of the OAS in matters of social inclusion and access to human rights with special consideration to populations in vulnerable situations.

Ligia Bolivar is currently an Adjunct Researcher at the UCAB’s Center for Human Rights, responsible for the area of migrant rights.

Ligia was previously the Director of the Centre for Human Rights at the Andres Bello Catholic University since 1999, where she also taught undergraduate and graduate programs in the area of human rights. She studied Sociology at Andres Bello Catholic University (Caracas) and completed her postgraduate studies in Human Rights at Universidad Central de Venezuela.