SPEAKERS

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Jiří Kozák
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic

Jiří Kozák is Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. He was previously Program Manager and Secretary of the Foreign Affairs Policy team of Civic Democratic Party and Member of the Election Campaign Team of the SPOLU coalition. He has also served as Director of the CEVRO Institute. Jiří Kozák has organized numerous projects of political education and democracy assistance in the Czech Republic as well as abroad. He has lectured in many countries on human rights, political education and building of political parties and systems. He is the author and co-editor of The Memory of Nations - Democratic Transition Guide, one of the largest comparative studies of democratic transitions in 13 countries.

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Marek Havrda
Deputy Minister of European Affairs of the Czech Republic

Marek Havrda, Ph.D. is Deputy Minister for European Affairs of the Czech Government. He contributes to coordination of the Czech Republic’s positions on EU policies and supports the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2022.
Marek has built expertise in the area of evidence-based policy making, Impact Assessment (IA) and the use of behavioral economics for policy formulation, inter alia he supported IAs in the domains of Health and Consumer protection in the European Commission, led IA for a major legislative initiative at the Czech Ministry of Finance, served as Advisor for EU Structural Funds at the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, and since 2014 has been a Member of the Impact Assessment Board of the Legislative Council of the Czech Government. Between 2016 and 2021 Marek led Artificial Intelligence Policy & Social Impacts activities at GoodAI, a private AI R&D start-up, and contributed to international Artificial Intelligence ethics and governance initiatives including UNESCO Recommendations for Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (led development of Ethical Impact Assessment methodology), OECD Network of Experts on Artificial Intelligence and IEEE Ethically Aligned Design (co-authored IEEE 7010-2020 Standard).Previously, he served in leadership roles with think-tanks, e.g. EUROPEUM Institute for European Policy, and co-founded SCHOLA EMPIRICA, a think-and-do-tank focusing on evidence-based education. In his early career, Marek gained experience with global material technology companies. Marek was invited to deliver talks at global events and leading institutions, including University of Cambridge (Centre for Future of Intelligence), DARPA, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and United Nations events.

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Youdon Aukatsang
Member of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile

Youdon Aukatsang has done her MA in International Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA, MA from International Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and BA from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. She has previously worked as a Senior Program Officer at the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) and as a Research Associate for the Tibetan Women Association. She has been serving the Tibetan community in various capacities for more than 20 years without any sectarian biases. Her area of interest includes democracy & human rights, Sino-Tibetan issues, international relations, women & youth empowerment, education & societal development, etc. Ms. Aukatsang was earlier elected to the 14th, 15th, and 16th TPiE. She is the Founding Director of Empowering the Vision Project (ENVISION). She is currently the Managing Trustee of the Empowering the Vision Project, and a member of the 17th Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile from Dhotoe province.

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 Jiří Oberfalzer
Vice-President of the Czech Senate

Jiří Oberfalzer, Vice-President of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague. From 1990-1993, he was Head of the Press Department of the Office of the President of Czechoslovakia (Václav Havel), then Executive Director of the Patriae Foundation and founding member of Forum 2000. Since 1999, he is a member of the Civic Democratic Party. In 2004, he was elected Senator of the Czech Senate, re-elected in 2010, 2016 and 2022. He has been Vice-President of the Czech Senate since 2018.

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Jitka Seitlová
Vice-President of the Czech Senate

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Isabel Santos
Member of the European Parliament

Isabel Santos is since 2019 a Member of the European Parliament where she performs, among others, the role of Chair of the Delegation for relations with the Mashreq countries, Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Subcommittee on Human Rights, the Delegation to the Eurolat Parliamentary Assembly and is the European Parliament Rapporteur for Albania. Previously, Mrs. Santos was a Member of the Portuguese Parliament (between 2005-2011 and 2015-2019) having, simultaneously, carried out the roles of both Vice-President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and President of the Commission on Human Rights and Humanitarian Questions of the OSCE. Within Mrs. Santos’ areas of interest there are, among others, Human Rights, Foreign Affairs, the Rule of Law, and Migrations.

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Tenpa Yarphel
Member of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile

Tenpa Yarphel was born in Tibet where he became a novice monk in Tsenyi Namgyal Choekorling Monastery and learned prayer recitation, masked dance, and other rituals of the Drukpa sect of Kagyu. Later he studied fundamental Buddhist scriptures and philosophy from Khampa Ghar monastery and Serta Larung Ghar University. After escaping from Tibet into exile in India, he joined Sera Jey monastery in 2001 for further Buddhist philosophy studies. In 2004, he joined Sarah College for Higher Tibetan studies and completed his Thorim Rigney Rabjampa (Bachelor Degree) affiliated with the Department of Education, CTA in 2008. He worked as an editor at the Department of Religion and Culture, CTA in 2009 and edited three volumes of books on the history of over 300 monasteries including the four religious sects of Buddhism and the Bon religion of Tibet. He was elected to the 15th Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile in 2011 and was re-elected to the 16th Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile in 2016. As a Parliament Member, he has actively participated in parliamentary proceedings, official settlement visitations, and Tibet outreach programs. He is currently one of the members of the 17th Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile from the Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism and a member of the Standing Committee.

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Eva Decroix
Member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies

Eva Decroix is a Czech politician, advocate, registered mediator and businesswoman. She has been a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic since October 2021 and is a member of the Chamber's Committee on Foreign Affairs. She is also a representative of the Vysočina Region, and has also been a representative of the city of Jihlava from 2020 to 2022.

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Tomáš Etzler (Moderator)
Journalist

Tomáš Etzler is a television journalist, a scriptwriter and a dramaturg with professional experience of 27 years. As a correspondent and producer for CNN and the Czech Television, he worked in over 60 countries on five continents. Tomas covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as conflicts in Haiti or Lebanon. He worked on numerous other major world events from the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 to Japanese Tsunami or assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011. His work was also featured on ITN, Channel 4, BBC Radio and in Czech press. Tomas has received numerous international awards, including an EMMY Award in 2008.

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Balázs Gargya
Policy Officer China, European External Action Service

Balázs Gargya is in charge of human rights issues in China at the Asia and Pacific Department of the European External Action Service. He is an EU official since 2004. In his previous capacity with DG Trade of the European Commission, he coordinated trade relations between the European Union and China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Previously, he served as Head of the Trade and other EU Policies Section at the EU Delegation to Turkey, Ankara, and was before posted as an EU diplomat to New Delhi, India. His earlier responsibilities included negotiating trade agreements for the European Union (services and investment chapters) and working on competition cases in the electronic communication sector. A lawyer by education, he also worked at the Legal Service of the Council of the European Union, and was in private legal practice with an international law firm. He also followed postgraduate studies in international relations at the University of Amsterdam.

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Kateřina Procházková (Moderator)
Journalist, Sinopsis

Kateřina Procházková is a journalist for Sinopsis, a project of the Institute of East Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. She previously worked as an editor of the foreign editorial office of Czech Television and a correspondent for Czech Radio in Asia. She lived in Asia for about ten years, in Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing. She studied journalism at the University of Ostrava and the University of Glasgow. She acquired language skills at the National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei, Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) and Sophia University in Tokyo. She is also a member of the Foreign Correspondent Club and Beijing International Society.

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Pavel Fischer
Member of the Czech Senate

Pavel Fischer is a Czech politician and diplomat who has been Senator since 2018 and Chair of the Foreign Affairs committee. Fischer previously served as Czech Ambassador to France from 2003 to 2010. He was a candidate in the 2018 Czech presidential election and finished in third place with 10.23% of the vote.  

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Přemysl Rabas
Member of the Czech Senate

Přemysl Rabas is a Czech senator elected from the North Bohemian region of Chomutov. In the Czech Senate he leads the Friends of Tibet Group, which together with a similar group in the Chamber of Deputies forms one of the largest pro-Tibet parliamentary initiatives in the world. He has been involved in supporting Tibet for a long time. As a Green Party MP from 2006 to 2010, he participated in many activities in support of Tibet, including the reception of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and actions to boycott the Beijing Olympics. Přemysl Rabas has long run the zoo in Chomutov, and for more than ten years he has been managing the Safari Park in Dvůr Králové, whose rescue programmes return many endangered species back to the wild. 

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Hayato Josef Okamura
Member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies

Hayato Josef Okamura, the chair of the Tibet Support Group in the Chamber of Deputies, was born in 1966 in Prague and spent part of his childhood in Japan. He studied Christian theology and religious studies at Charles University. In October 2021, he was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic for the Christian Democratic Party. In the Chamber of Deputies, he serves, among others, on the Foreign and Petitions Committees, is the chairman of the Subcommittee on National Minorities, and heads the Czech Republic-Japan Inter-Parliamentary Group. MP Hayato Josef Okamura is of Czech-Japanese-Korean origin, married, has two daughters and three sons with his wife Ludmila.

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Thinlay Chukki
Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration for Central and Eastern Europe

Thinlay Chukki is the Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama for Central and Eastern Europe at Tibet Bureau based in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to this, she was the Special Appointee for Human Rights at the same office and has also worked as a researcher at the UN, EU and Human Rights Desk of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Dharamshala, India. She is a Harvard Law School graduate with an LL.M degree, a National Law School of India Graduate with an LL.M degree in Business Laws and has LL.B degree from SDM Law College, Mangalore University with distinction and several gold medals. She has represented Tibetans at the UN including UN Human Rights Council and has been invited to speak at several international conferences including C20 Conference 2020, Saudi Arabia and at UN Side-Events. Prior to joining CTA, she headed the South-India Legal Department of TATA Motors, one of the largest automobile companies in India. She has also translated for His Holiness the Dalai Lama on several occasions.

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Michael van Walt van Praag
International Law professor

Michael is an international lawyer, mediator and advisor in intrastate peace processes, and he teaches international law and international relations. He is Executive President of Kreddha, an international conflict resolution organization and Senior Fellow at the Sompong Sucharitkul Center for Advanced International Legal Studies of Golden Gate University Law School, San Francisco. He was Visiting Professor of Modern International Relations and International Law at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until 2015. Michael has facilitated peace processes and advised parties to negotiations in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and the Caucasus. He served as UN Senior Legal Advisor to the Foreign Minister of East Timor during the country’s transition to independence, and as legal advisor to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration. Michael was awarded a knighthood by H. M. the King and the Government of the Netherlands—and given the rare distinction of Commander in the Order of the House of Oranje Nassau—for his “exceptional service to society with a global impact”, in particular his international contribution to the resolution of conflicts and to the promotion of rights of oppressed peoples. His most recent books are Tibet Brief 20/20, co-authored with Miek Boltjes (Outskirts Press, 2020); the prize-winning book Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations Since Chinggis Khan (co-authored/edited with Timothy Brook and Miek Boltjes, Chicago University Press, 2018). 

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Samuel Chu
President, The Campaign for Hong Kong

Samuel Chu is the president of The Campaign for Hong Kong, an organization committed to advocating for American and global leadership and policies that advance human rights and democracy in Hong Kong. Most recently, Chu was the founder and managing director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC), the first-ever Washington DC-based, nonpartisan nonprofit for Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement. Since 2019, Chu has successfully advocated for the passage of landmark legislation such as the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, and numerous other policies supporting Hong Kong. In direct response, Hong Kong authorities issued arrest warrants against Samuel in July 2020, making him the first foreign national to be targeted under the National Security Law. In addition, in July 2021, the People's Republic of China imposed sanctions against Chu under its new anti-sanctions law.

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David Plášek
Analyst, European Values Center for Security Policy

As an analyst for the RW Program, David is involved in topics and projects regarding East Asia. He started cooperating with the European Values Security Center in summer of 2021 and previously worked in the academy as a university lecturer. David studied and researched international relations and European studies at universities in Belgium (Leuven), Germany (Heidelberg), and South Korea (Seoul). Among his past working experience belong, inter alia, analytical processes and projects for international companies as well as for state institutions. His language skills include proficiency in En, De, It, Kor, Ne.

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Kai Müller
Executive Director, International Campaign for Tibet Germany

Before joining the International Campaign for Tibet in 2005 as Executive Director in Germany, Kai Müller served on the board of Amnesty International Germany and worked as research associate in the German parliament. He heads the Berlin office of ICT. Since 2015, he also coordinates ICT's United Nations initiatives.

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Wangpo Tethong
Executive Director, International Campaign for Tibet Europe

Wangpo Tethong was born in Switzerland and holds a masters degree in Philosophy from Zurich University. Prior to joining the International Campaign for Tibet as Executive Director in Amsterdam in November 2021, Wangpo has served with Greenpeace Switzerland as deputy head of the media department; Green Party Canton Zurich as party secretary and spokesperson; and SWISSAID, heading the campaigns and media division. He also served as a board member of ICT Germany, and a member of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. Additionally, Wangpo is a member of several Tibet-related organizations, including the Tibetan Youth Association in Europe, the Swiss-Tibetan Friendship Society and Filming for Tibet. 

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