Ioana Bauer has been active in the area of protecting human rights and dignity since 2005. Since 2010, she has dedicated her efforts to eradicating human trafficking by leading and shaping prevention activities, developing materials on the issue, designing capacity building activities, and creating new policy frameworks on the issue.
Ioana is an Ashoka Fellow, a 2020 Resilience Fellow with GITOC, and is recognized as one of the women leaders advancing the UN SDGs globally. She is currently serving as Chairwoman at eLiberare, a leading Romanian anti-trafficking CSO, after finishing her term as policy adviser in the office of the Prime Minister in the Romanian Government, where she led the working group on child safety and has piloted policy initiatives in the area of combating and preventing trafficking in human beings.
As part of the Ukrainian crisis response, Ioana has spearheaded a new protection model designed at preventing and identifying trafficking in human beings cases among refugees and has supported capacity building efforts among a multitude of first responders.
Ioana is passionate about fighting injustice, being a firm believer in the power of community and collective action. Other than her professional endeavors, Ioana spends her time intentionally loving on her family: she is a proud girl-mom and dog-mom and will rarely turn down a snowboarding adventure with her spouse.

Therese Hydén took up her position as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Sweden to Romania in September 2019. Prior to this, she was Consul General of Sweden in Istanbul between 2016 – 2019. She has been employed at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs since 1997. Ambassador Hydén has worked at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm as Director and Deputy Head of the Department for Eastern Europe and Central Asia and as Head of the Section for International Law. She has held several positions abroad, including at the Swedish Delegation to the Council of Europe and the Swedish Permanent Representation to the EU. During the Swedish Presidency to the Council of the EU, she was chairperson for the Foreign Relations Counsellors Working Group. Ambassador Hydén has also worked for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in New York. She holds a law degree and an LLM from Lund University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. Ambassador Hydén is married and has two children.

US Ambassador to Romania since December 2022. Previously, Ambassador Kavalec served as the Head of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2019-2022. Prior to that, she was Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (EUR) at the Department of State.
A career U.S. diplomat, Ambassador Kavalec has held a variety of diplomatic assignments, including Director for Russian Affairs, Deputy Permanent Delegate and Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Mission to the UNESCO in Paris, Deputy Coordinator for U.S. Assistance to Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, and Director of Conflict Prevention in the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. Her overseas assignments have included service as the Political Counselor in Ukraine, two tours in Russia covering political issues, as well as tours in Romania and Brazil. In Romania, she served as Cultural Attache between 2005 and 2008. She is the recipient of numerous State Department awards, as well as a Presidential Rank Award.
Ambassador Kavalec holds an A.B. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master’s in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Her foreign languages include Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. She is married and has three children.

Previously, she has been in progressively responsible positions in the Government of Romania. A leading advocate for human rights in Romania, with over 20 years of grass-roots, strategic and policy level experience in the fields of anti-trafficking, refugee protection, child protection and disability, she has contributed substantially to the development, promotion and adoption of public policies and relevant legislation in the above mentioned fields in Romania.
As State Counsellor, she coordinates the Romanian anti-trafficking system, and has succeeded in facilitating and leading complex policy design processes, monitoring mechanisms and coordinating wide reporting flows, while ensuring a smooth cooperation of all state and private actors. She has constantly pushed for anti-trafficking reforms at national and European level, as one of the promoters of criminalizing demand, as well as for a tailored national plan for compliance with the international recommendations in the area of human trafficking.
Ms. Turza has an outstanding professional and high level policy maker profile, being a swift and reliable partner of dialogue for all strategic international and regional partners in the area of human trafficking and other areas covered by her mandate. In the last year, she has also graciously led the strategic coordination of humanitarian response in Romania, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, proving once more her ability to navigate a complex landscape of national, European and international stakeholders, while leading the national protection process.
During her two mandates in the Government of Romania ( 2019 – present – Secretary of State – National Authority for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Children and Adoption and State Counsellor in the Prime Minister’s Chancellery), she has elaborated and promoted for adoption over 15 pieces of national legislation, at the level of Law, Government Ordinance, Government Decision or President’s Order, on the protection and safety of children (National Program – Caring for children), the rights of people with disabilities (Law 140/2022 – assisted decision-making mechanism for persons with cognitive disabilities), the protection and inclusion of refugees from Ukraine – (National Plan of Measures for the Inclusion and Protection of Refugees from Ukraine), rehabilitation therapies for children with autism, National Mechanism for Identification and Referral of Victims of Trafficking in Persons, improving and monitoring of the adoption process (Action Plan – Children, no files) etc.
She is a Political Sciences graduate, Fulbright/Humphrey Fellow with a LLM in International Humanitarian Law and MA (equiv) in Inclusion Public Policies at University of Minnesota, USA

Ioana Bauer has been active in the area of protecting human rights and dignity since 2005. Since 2010, she has dedicated her efforts to eradicating human trafficking by leading and shaping prevention activities, developing materials on the issue, designing capacity building activities, and creating new policy frameworks on the issue.
Ioana is an Ashoka Fellow, a 2020 Resilience Fellow with GITOC, and is recognized as one of the women leaders advancing the UN SDGs globally. She is currently serving as Chairwoman at eLiberare, a leading Romanian anti-trafficking CSO, after finishing her term as policy adviser in the office of the Prime Minister in the Romanian Government, where she led the working group on child safety and has piloted policy initiatives in the area of combating and preventing trafficking in human beings.
As part of the Ukrainian crisis response, Ioana has spearheaded a new protection model designed at preventing and identifying trafficking in human beings cases among refugees and has supported capacity building efforts among a multitude of first responders.
Ioana is passionate about fighting injustice, being a firm believer in the power of community and collective action. Other than her professional endeavors, Ioana spends her time intentionally loving on her family: she is a proud girl-mom and dog-mom and will rarely turn down a snowboarding adventure with her spouse.

Diane Schmitt took up the position as EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator on 1 July 2021. She has spent most of her career in the European Commission where she has held different positions across various policy areas, in particular related to migration, security and justice. Before her appointment, Diane Schmitt was Adviser for Enhancing External and Internal Policy Aspects of Migration and Security at Directorate General Migration and Home Affairs. From 2014 until 2019, she was Head of Cabinet of the European Commissioner in charge of Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship. She is from Luxembourg and studied law in France.
The EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator is responsible for improving coordination and coherence between EU institutions and EU agencies, as well as between EU Member States and international actors, and for contributing to the development of EU policies to address trafficking in human beings.

Anne-Lise joined the Office of the OSCE Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings in 2019. Contributing to the Office’s efforts to assist the 57 OSCE participating States in the development and implementation of anti-trafficking strategies, she focuses on gender-sensitive approaches, demand-reduction initiatives to end sexual exploitation, and responses to the trafficking of persons belonging to ethnic and national minorities.
Prior to joining the OSCE, Anne-Lise worked at the United Nations in New York in the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict in an advising role on child protection policies in conflict-affected areas.
She graduated in political science from Sciences Po (Grenoble, France) and has a masters in international relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies – IHEID (Geneva, Switzerland).

Malaika Oringo is the Founding Director of Footprint to Freedom, a survivor-led organization that empowers survivors of human trafficking to advocate for the abolitionist legal model, gender equality, climate action, proper labor rights, safe migration policies, victim support, and financial inclusion. She is the Director of the Africa Survivor Coalition, and serving member of Cluster Beyond surviVORs. Professionally, she works with The Salvation Army as the Global Specialist on Survivor Engagement and Inclusion. She is a former member of the International Survivor Advisory Council under the OSCE(ODIHR) Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, was awarded by Child10 and Queen Silvia of Sweden for her efforts to combat child sex trafficking in Europe, and received MyVoiceForJustice Award 2022 from DNA for AFRICA

Jacob has an extensive experience of international work for children’s rights with a collaborative impact approach. He has spent most of his career on multi-sectoral partnership; academia, business industry, civil society and public sector working together to strengthen children’s rights. Jacob is the former Secretary General for Child10 and was previously the first Chair of the World Anti-Bullying Forum. Besides working as the Chair for Child10 and Swedish Anti-trafficking Platform, Jacob is the chair for Youth 2030 Movement and a Board Member for Friends Foundation.

Jacob has an extensive experience of international work for children’s rights with a collaborative impact approach. He has spent most of his career on multi-sectoral partnership; academia, business industry, civil society and public sector working together to strengthen children’s rights. Jacob is the former Secretary General for Child10 and was previously the first Chair of the World Anti-Bullying Forum. Besides working as the Chair for Child10 and Swedish Anti-trafficking Platform, Jacob is the chair for Youth 2030 Movement and a Board Member for Friends Foundation.

Ambassador at Large for Combating Trafficking in Persons, Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs since April 2021, has a legal background with a broad experience of working in counter trafficking in Sweden as well as internationally. She has previously served at the IOM (International Organization for Migration) in Turkey, the CBSS TF-THB (Council of the Baltic Sea States Task Force against Trafficking) and the European Commission in Brussels.

She has worked with national coordination against trafficking at the County Administrative Board of Stockholm and the Swedish Gender Equality Agency. She has further worked at the Swedish Migration Board and has a long experience from the Government Offices in Sweden for example from the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Employment as well as the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Deputy Chief Prosecutor of the Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), Romania, appointed by decree of the President of Romania. From September 2020 to April 2023, she was acting as interim Chief Prosecutor of DIICOT. Previously, she held other senior positions within DIICOT, namely head of office prosecutor, head of department prosecutor and deputy chief prosecutor, positions from which she coordinated the prosecution work of prosecutors specialising in the investigation of organised crime groups involved in drug trafficking.

Ms Pâțu has more than 20 years’ experience as a magistrate, including 13 years as a prosecutor at DIICOT, having prosecuted complex cases of drug trafficking, trafficking in human beings, criminal and financial crime. She has experience as a trainer at the National Institute of Magistracy and in management projects carried out with European funds, as coordinator of the SNOW WHITE project “Coordinated Fight against New Trends in Drug Trafficking” (from December 2018 to March 2020), project co-financed by the European Commission and which had as partners the the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the High Court of Cassation and Justice, the DIICOT, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office of Belgium and Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Lithuanian Police.

She has participated as an expert or auditor in numerous conferences, working groups, training sessions in the fields of combating cross-border organised crime, drug trafficking and human trafficking, with language skills in English, French and Italian. She graduated from the Faculty of Law of Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi (1998 – 2002) and from the National Institute of Magistracy (2002 – 2004).

Kevin Hyland was the United Kingdom’s first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, leading efforts to tackle slavery and human trafficking. He left the post in May 2018. He is the Chair of IHRB’s Leadership Group for Responsible Recruitment, collaboration between leading companies and expert organisations to drive positive change in the way that migrant workers are recruited. He was formerly head of the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Human Trafficking Unit. Hyland helped to establish and is now the Global Strategy Director of the Santa Marta Group, a body comprising international law enforcement agencies, civil society, NGOs and the Catholic Church. Kevin Hyland OBE has been elected as Ireland’s representative on the Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA) from 2019 to 2022.

interior attaché of the Spanish Embassy for Romania, Republic of Moldova, Hungary and Slovenia since June 2019, has 19 years of experience in the Spanish National Police, first as a chief inspector, having led and coordinated special investigations related to trafficking in human beings and connected crimes for seven years, and then as a chief superintendent within the Department for Police Cooperation with International Organisms (IO), having conducted and managed the National Police’s participation in multilateral missions and projects for twelve years