International School for Transparency

Richard Calland is the Programme Director of the Economic Governance Programme at Idasa. He is also Associate Professor in Public Law and Director of the Democratic Governance & Rights Unit at the University of Cape Town. He specializes in the law and practice of the right to access to information and whistleblowing protection; in administrative justice and public ethics; and in constitutional design – largely derived from his work as programme manager of the Political Information & Monitoring Service at Idasa which he led from its inception in 1995 until 2003. In South Africa, he writes a fortnightly political column for the Mail and Guardian newspaper, 'Contretemps'. Before coming to South Africa in 1994, Calland practiced law at the London Bar.

Mukelani Dimba is the Deputy Executive Director of the Open Democracy Advice Centre (ODAC), a law centre that specialises in Freedom of Information and Whistleblower Protection laws in South Africa. He is also the co-convener of South Africa’s National Information Officers Forum, a body of government officials tasked with implementation of South Africa’s Freedom of Information law. Mr. Dimba acts Project Manager for the annual South African Access To Information Index, a joint project between ODAC and the South African Human Rights Commission which assesses implementation of South Africa’s access to information laws by South African government institutions.

Mr. Dimba has worked on Freedom of Information issues not only in South Africa but also in Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana and Sierra Leone. He is the Chairperson of the Africa Freedom of Information Centre, a pan-African Freedom of Information (FOI) advocacy organisation based in Uganda. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group in South Africa.

Kevin Dunion was appointed as Scotland’s first Information Commissioner in 2003. Since the Freedom of Information Act came into effect in Scotland in 2005, he has dealt with more than 2500 appeals and issued over 1000 formal decisions. Some of these have been high profile such as ordering the release of the surgical mortality rates for every surgeon in Scotland; requiring the disclosure of the individual expenses of members of the Scottish Parliament; and telling a health authority to reveal the full contents of a £2.1 billion hospital contract with a private company.

Kevin is Co-Director of the Centre for Freedom of Information at The University of Dundee, which was launched in January 2009. As well as hosting delegations to Scotland from a number of other countries, he has been directly involved in projects regarding Jamaica (with the Carter Center), Malawi (with the British Council and Scottish Government) and India (The World Bank). He is also Rector of the University of St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university. He was educated at the University of St Andrews and University of Edinburgh. Prior to becoming Commissioner, he was head of the environmental organization, Friends of the Earth International, which included representing the network of 65 countries at international commissions and summits. He is the author of a number of books and articles, and is currently writing a handbook on freedom of information rights and enforcement in Scotland to be published by Dundee University Press in 2011.

Juan Pablo Guerrero joined the International Budget Partnership in September 2009. Based in Mexico City, he is responsible for managing the Mentoring Government Capacity for Budget Transparency and Participation program, helping governments build transparency systems that identify and provide the information that civil society needs to participate in policy processes. Between 2002 and September 2009, Guerrero was one of the founding commissioners of the Federal Institute for Access to Public Information (IFAI), the independent authority in Mexico responsible for facilitating the public’s right to access information. He was chairman of IFAI’s commission to enforce the Federal Transparency Law and was the general coordinator of the Comunidades Project, funded by the Hewlett Foundation and dedicated to raising awareness and understanding the right to information in marginalized communities (2005-07). Before that, Mr. Guerrero was a full-time professor and researcher in the Public Administration Department at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) from 1994 to 2003. He was news reporter and correspondent in Washington and Paris from 1986 and 1994. He completed his Ph. D. coursework in Political Science at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and holds two Master’s Degrees, in Public Policy from IEP-Paris and in Economics and International Politics from SAIS of the Johns Hopkins University.

Patricia Jonason is Assistant Professor in the Public Law Department at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She teaches Administrative, European and Human Rights Law. She is inter alia responsible for a Masters programme on Human Rights and the Public Administration at Södertörn University.

Her research interests are principally in the Right of Access to Information as well as in the Environmental Governance. She holds a PhD in Public Law from the University of Paris XII, France (2001), with a comparative doctoral dissertation about Data Protection and the Right of Access to Information in France and in Sweden

Laura Neuman is the Assistant Director for the Americas Program at The Carter Center. She is the Access to Information Project Manager and directs and implements Carter Center transparency projects, including projects in Jamaica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Mali. She edited five widely distributed guidebooks on fostering transparency and preventing corruption and has presented at numerous international seminars relating to ATI legislation and implementation. Book and article publications include Access to Information: A Key to Democracy, Using Freedom of Information Laws to Enforce Welfare Benefits Rights in the United States, and co-authored Compelling Disclosure of Campaign Contributions through Access to Information Laws: The South African Experience and Relevance for the Americas, and Making the Law Work: the Challenges of Implementation. Ms. Neuman is a member of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue task force on transparency, a board member of the Center for Transparency and Access to Information Studies, and an International Associate to the Open Democracy Advice Center, South Africa. She has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the US State Department, and the Government of Cayman. As part of her transparency work, she served as Executive Secretary for the Carter Center’s Council for Ethical Business Practices. She also has led and participated in international election monitoring missions throughout the Western hemisphere. Prior to joining The Carter Center in August 1999, Ms. Neuman was senior staff attorney for Senior Law at Legal Action of Wisconsin. She is a 1993 graduate of the University of Wisconsin law school

Alasdair Roberts is the Jerome L. Rappaport Professor of Law and Public Policy at Suffolk University Law School. He writes extensively on problems of governance, law and public policy. His most recent book, The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the New Architecture of Government, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. His preceding book, The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government, was published by New York University Press in 2008. Kirkus Reviews called it "a trenchant analysis of the last eight years of American political history." An earlier book, Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age, received the 2006 Brownlow Book Award from the US National Academy of Public Administration, and three other academic book awards. He has also won several awards for his journal articles.

Professor Roberts was elected as a fellow of the US National Academy of Public Administration in 2007. He is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the School of Public Policy, University College London. Previously he has had fellowships with the Open Society Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is co-editor of the journal Governance, and also on the editorial boards of several other journals in the field of public administration.

Before joining Suffolk Law, Professor Roberts was a professor of public administration in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and an associate professor of public administration at Queen's University, Canada.Professor Roberts received a JD from the University of Toronto in 1984, a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard University in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University in 1994. His web address is www.aroberts.us.

Tseliso Thipanyane holds a B.Sc, LL.B and LL.M (constitutional litigation) and has worked extensively on human rights, democracy and good governance over the last 20 years.

He is an advocate of the High Courts of Lesotho and South Africa and has worked at the University of Kwazulu-Natal as a researcher and acting director of the Centre for Criminal Justice and lectured in law at the University of the Western Cape-South Africa.

Tseliso is the former head of the Research and Documentation of the South African Human Rights Commission, responsible for the monitoring of the realization of economic and social rights and access to information in South Africa a well as the former Corporate Affairs Officer of the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities-South Africa.

He was a member of the Juvenile Justice Project Committee of the South African Law Reform Commission responsible for drafting the child justice bill and Deputy Chief Executive Officer (Operations) of the South African Human Rights Commission responsible for the Commission’s provincial offices and the Commission’s research, education and training programmes before being appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the South African Human Rights Commission

He is currently an independent Human Rights and Good Governance Consultant (based in New York)