FOURTH ANNUAL
INTERNATIONAL RIGHT-TO-KNOW DAY CELEBRATION
Collaboration on Government Secrecy
American University Washington College of Law
September 28, 2010
Speaker Bios
CHAD DOBSON
Chad Dobson founded the Bank Information Center (BIC) in1987 and was its Executive Director until 1996, returning to it in that capacity in December 2007. He established BIC to encourage transparency and accountability within international financial institutions (IFIs) and to provide support for civil society organizations and accountability advocates working to open political space around development decision-making, in order to ensure that local communities have an important voice in decisions that affect them. BIC has partnered with civil society in developing and transition countries -- as well as the Global North -- to influence the World Bank and other IFIs to promote social and economic justice and ecological sustainability. Chad also founded and directed the Consumers Choice Council to protect labeling systems (organic, fair trade, Marine Stewardship Council, Forest Stewardship Council) during the initial development of the World Trade Organization. At Oxfam America, where he was Director of Policy from 2003-2007, Chad was responsible for developing the organization's Washington presence, and his portfolio included the Fair Trade campaign, extractive industries work, and policy and advocacy activity associated with humanitarian relief. Chad currently serves on the board of the International Relations Center, the Forest People's Programme/World Rainforest Movement, Green Seal, and the Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellowship.
SARAH HUTCHISON
Sarah Hutchison holds the title of Head of Policy and Information in the Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner, located in St. Andrews, Scotland. She heads up Commissioner Kevin Dunion's Policy and Information Team, which is responsible for developing the organisation's external communications on all freedom of information issues, for press and media relations, and for managing the enquiries service and publication schemes approval process. Sarah also advises the Commissioner on a variety of policy-related issues, whilst liaising with senior officials in public bodies and their policy and legal advisers.
ANNE-MARIE LEROY
Anne-Marie Leroy, a French national, was appointed Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the World Bank Group (WBG) on March 9, 2009. Prior to joining the WBG, she was a partner of the Paris Office of Denton Wilde Sapte LLP since 2005, where she was in charge of its Department of Public Law. A graduate of both the Paris Institute for Political Science and the National School for Public Administration, with a graduate degree in the Sociology of Organizations, Anne-Marie joined the Council of State (Conseil d'Etat), the highest court in France for public and administrative law, in 1986, where she worked as a judge for five years.
In 1991, Anne-Marie was appointed to the Ministry of National Education, as a director of legal and international affairs, managing the ministry's representation in courts and providing legal advice to the Minister and ministry units, and bilateral relations with partner countries in the field of education. Her work included technical assistance projects in developing countries, as well as in multilateral institutions, especially the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). From January 1995 to May 1998, she served in the World Bank, MENA region as a senior public-sector specialist, working on public management issues, especially in Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. Returning to Paris in 1998 to take up the position of Department Head in charge of Governance and Civil Society issues in the Public Management Service of the OECD, she was soon appointed as Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, in charge of government reform. Following the presidential election of 2002, she returned to the Council of State and her functions as a judge. In 2003, she was also appointed by the Board of Executive Directors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as a judge with the IDB's Administrative Tribunal.
TOBY McINTOSH
Toby McIntosh, a former White House correspondent for the Bureau of National Affairs, was the long-time managing editor of BNA's flagship Daily Report for Executives and now is its Director of Editorial Quality. An expert in transparency at international governing bodies and multi-national financial institutions, he also is Steering Committee Coordinator of the Global Transparency Initiative and recently took on the responsibility of Managing Editor of freedominfo.org, an online network of international freedom of information advocates. Over the course of his career as a reporter, he has covered antitrust, consumer protection, the Office of Management and Budget, information policy, the relationship between emerging technologies and government, Senate holds, and regulatory reform. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he covered the Reagan and Bush 41 Administrations as a member of the White House Press Corps, then spent 15 years at the helm of Daily Report for Executives, also editing four other publications during those years. Toby received the Joseph Brechner Freedom of Information Award in 1990 for groundbreaking articles on the then-enormous roadblocks to obtaining access to electronic records, is the recipient of 1992 awards from the National Press Association and the Newsletter Publishers Foundation for an article on Senate "holds," and also has won awards from the American Library Association, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, and the business Council for the Reduction of Paperwork. Most recently, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Washington, D.C. Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Government from Oberlin College.
JANET M. McLEAN
Janet McLean holds the position of Professor of Law and Governance at Dundee Law School, University of Dundee, in Dundee, Scotland. Prior to 2006, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland Faculty of Law, where she also served as Deputy Dean during 1999-2001. She has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University (2001), at the University of Dundee (2005), at Princeton University (2010), and she was the George P. Smith Distinguished Visiting Professor at Indiana University at Bloomington in 2003. She has acted as an advisor to the New Zealand government on numerous occasions, serving on the Legislation Advisory Committee and on a ministerial inquiry into Human Rights Protection in New Zealand (2000), and she has also contributed to the work of the World Health Organisation in the Western Pacific. Professor McLean is widely published across public law topics, including in human rights, the organisation of health services, the nature of the executive, privatisation, judicial review, and the effect of international law in domestic courts. She holds an LL.B degree (Hons.) from Victoria University of Wellington, an LL.M degree from the University of Michigan, and is enrolled as a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand.
LAURA NEUMAN
Laura Neuman is Manager of The Carter Center's Access to Information Project and Associate Director of the Americas Program. She directs and implements all Carter Center transparency projects, including projects in Latin America, Africa, and China. She most recently organized and managed the International Conference on the Right to Public Information, convening more than 125 participants from 40 countries, and the follow-on Americas Conference and African Regional Conference on the Right of Access to Information. Ms. Neuman edited six widely distributed guidebooks on fostering transparency and preventing corruption and has presented at numerous international seminars relating to Access to Information legislation and implementation. Her book and article publications include Enforcement Models: Content and Context; Making the Access to Information Law Work: Challenges of Implementation; Access to Information, A Key to Democracy; Using Freedom of Information Laws to Enforce Welfare Benefits Rights in the United States; and Compelling Disclosure of Campaign Contributions through Access to Information Laws: The South African Experience and Relevance for the Americas. She also has led and participated in international election monitoring missions throughout the Western hemisphere.
Ms. Neuman has served as a member of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue task force on transparency; as a board member of the Center for Transparency and Access to Information Studies, Mexico; as a consultant to the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and a number of governments; and as an International Associate to the Open Democracy Advice Center, South Africa. As part of her transparency work, she also served as Executive Secretary for The Carter Center's Council for Ethical Business Practices. Prior to joining The Carter Center in August 1999, she was senior staff attorney for Senior Law at Legal Action of Wisconsin, and she is a 1993 graduate of the University of Wisconsin law school.
ANDREA STEPHENSON
Andrea Stephenson is a Senior Research Assistant for the Collaboration on Government Secrecy. A third-year student at the Washington College of Law, she now is in her second academic semester of being a vital part of CGS. Andrea holds an undergraduate degree in psychology from Georgia Southern University, where she graduated with honors from the University Honors Program. She also is the Publications Editor of the American University International Law Review. Prior to law school, Andrea worked for five years in the general corporate and transactional law department of a mid-sized law firm, and she plans to put her skills to use in a career in either corporate law or government upon graduation in May 2011.
THOMAS M. SUSMAN
Tom Susman is Director of Government Affairs at the American Bar Association, where his holds responsibility for a wide range of ABA activities here in Washington, D.C. Before accepting that position upon his "retirement" in 2008, he was a long-time senior partner in the Washington Office of Ropes & Gray, where his work included counseling, litigation, and lobbying on access to government information and privacy, in addition to his general legislative and regulatory practice. Tom has testified frequently on FOIA reform before Congress and authored a number of works on information and privacy. He advised Shanghai on open government information, wrote a chapter on Access to Documents in the European Union for an ABA publication, co-authored a BNA portfolio on business information, and taught classes and courses on the FOIA to government lawyers, government access professionals, and law students. He has also been involved in a number of freedom of information cases at the state and federal levels and before foreign tribunals. A former Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Judicial College and President of the District of Columbia Public Library Foundation, he currently serves in the House of Delegates of the ABA. Before joining Ropes & Gray, Tom served on Capitol Hill as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee; prior to that he worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He graduated from Yale University, received his J.D. from the University of Texas Law School, and is a member of the American Law Institute. Among his many honors and distinctions, perhaps foremost among them is his receipt of the Collaboration on Government Secrecy's inaugural "Robert Vaughn FOIA Legend Award" at CGS's First Annual Freedom of Information Day Celebration in March 2008.
