Hala Aldosari is a scholar and activist from Saudi Arabia, now based in the United States. Her writings and research explore the social determinants of women’s health, violence against women, and women’s rights and human rights across the Arab Gulf States. She serves as an advisory board member for Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa and at the Gulf Center for Human Rights. She has also served as a member of Harvard’s initiative “Every Woman,” which aims to create a United Nations Global Treaty to prevent violence against women and girls.
Hanaa Soltan is a strategic consultant at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss PLLC, advising on international matters with a particular focus on the Middle East. In this role, she liaises with parties spanning the globe to effectuate streamlined representation on a host of legal and commercial matters with a United States nexus. She is also the Executive Director of MGA, a management and public relations consulting firm and co-founder of The Freedom Initiative. Domestically, she has worked extensively with youth empowerment programs, in addition to community and nonprofit organizations ranging from think tanks to issue-centered initiatives designed to combat social welfare issues, including educational reform and international micro-economic revival programs. Most notably, Hanaa spearheaded several global human rights campaigns, mobilizing international media outlets, human rights organizations, community leaders, senior officials, and various governmental agencies. Of those, she led high-level negotiations for the resolution of several of those cases, chief among them the release of her brother, Mohamed Soltan, who was held arbitrarily in Egypt for nearly two years and underwent a 489-day hunger strike. Since then, she has engaged heavily alongside Mohamed in broader human rights advocacy. They founded The Freedom Initiative together following his release.
Mohamed Soltan is a business development and investment advisor, policy expert, and founder of The Freedom Initiative. Soltan holds a Masters from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and bachelors in economics from The Ohio State University. Mohamed is also a Global Courage Fellow at Coeuraj USA and recipient of the 2022 James W. Foley American Hostage Freedom Award.
Soltan was a former political prisoner in Egypt and since his release and return to the US in 2015, he has become a prominent human rights defender and a leading voice on centering human rights in US foreign policy. Soltan is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, CNN, CBS, ABC, and Fox News.
Michele Dunne is executive director of the Franciscan Action Network and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A Middle East specialist at the U.S. Department of State for nearly 20 years, she also headed Middle East programs at the Carnegie Endowment and the Atlantic Council before making a shift to focus on U.S. domestic social justice issues in 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University.
