- The Hon. Mr. Justice Michael Hartmann, GBS, former NPJ of the Court of Final Appeal
- Gillian Phillips, Director of Editorial Legal Services, Guardian News & Media
- Peter Noorlander, Director of Legal Programmes at the Bertha Foundation and former Director of the Media Legal Defence Initiative (MLDI)
- Nani Jansen Reventlow, Associate Tenant at Doughty Street Chambers, Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and former Legal Director of the MLDI
- H R Dipendra, Lawyer (Malaysia) and media defense expert
- Mark Parsons, Partner at Hogan Lovells, TMT expert
- Louise Crawford, Foreign Legal Assistant at Hogan Lovells
- Gayathry Venkiteswaran, PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and former Executive Director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance
- Danny Gittings, Associate Professor and Senior Programme Director in the College of Humanities and Law at HKU SPACE
- Cliff Buddle, Special Projects Editor, South China Morning Post
- Doreen Weisenhaus, Associate Professor and Director of the Media Law Project at JMSC (HKU)
- Simon Young, Professor and Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Law (HKU)
THE HON. MR. JUSTICE MICHAEL HARTMANN, GBS
Mr Justice Michael Hartmann is a former non-permanent judge at the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. He received an LLB from the University of London through the University College of Rhodesia in 1967. He was an attorney in Rhodesia from 1971 until moving to Hong Kong to join the Legal Department in 1983. He was appointed as a District Judge in 1991 and a Judge of the Court of First Instance of the High Court in 1998, elevating to Justice of Appeal of the Court of Appeal of the High Court in 2008. He has rich judicial experience and expertise in a number of specialised areas of the law, including public law. He has heard a number of notable Judicial Review cases which contributed to the jurisprudence in administrative and constitutional law. In 2004, he set aside a search warrant issued by the ICAC, Hong Kong’s anti-corruption body, to raid 7 newspapers, a case which was widely recognized as a victory for Press freedom. In 2006, in the case of Leung Kwok Hung & Anr. v Chief Executive of the HKSAR, he declared that the procedures for covert surveillance and wiretapping were unconstitutional.
GILLIAN PHILLIPS
Gill Phillips, Director of Editorial Legal Services, Guardian News & Media, is a media law specialist. She advises on a range of content-related matters including defamation, privacy, contempt of court and reporting restrictions. She joined the BBC in 1987 as an in-house lawyer dealing with pre- and post- publication review and litigation matters. Between 1996 and 1997, she was an in-house lawyer at News Group Newspapers (The Sun and The News of the World) before moving to the College of Law, where she lectured in civil and criminal litigation and employment. In 2000, she joined Times Newspapers Limited as an in-house lawyer, becoming Head of Litigation. In 2009, she moved to Guardian News & Media Limited. She has advised Guardian News & Media on its ground-breaking coverage of major issues pertaining to the freedom of information in recent years, including phone-hacking, Wikileaks, the Leveson Inquiry and most recently the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden. She was a member of the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Libel Reform. She also sits as a part-time Employment Tribunal Judge and co-authors the College of Law Employment Law handbook.
PETER NOORLANDER
Peter is Director of Legal Programmes at the Bertha Foundation, an organisation that support activists, storytellers and lawyers that are working to bring about social and economic justice, and human rights for all. Peter has worked in the human rights NGO sector for twenty years, during which he co-founded and led the award-winning Media Legal Defence Initiative, ran a network of media and internet freedom lawyers and advised governments and NGOs on law reform. He has experience in litigation, law reform and human rights grant making, having worked at Open Society Foundations, ARTICLE 19 and the British Section of the International Commission of Jurists on issues ranging from the protection of free speech to surveillance and criminal justice reform. Peter is a trustee for Privacy International and Rights in Russia and he publishes on human rights issues. He is currently working on a book on international and comparative free speech law.
NANI JANSEN REVENTLOW
Nani Jansen Reventlow is an Associate Tenant at Doughty Street Chambers and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is a recognised international lawyer and expert in human rights litigation responsible for groundbreaking freedom of expression cases across several national and international jurisdictions. At the Berkman Klein Center, Nani’s work focuses on cross-disciplinary collaboration in litigation that challenges barriers to free speech online. She also acts as an Advisor to the Cyberlaw Clinic, supervising students on matters concerning technology and human rights.
Between 2011 and 2016, Nani has overseen the litigation practice of the Media Legal Defence Initiative globally, leading or advising on cases before the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and several African regional forums. Nani obtained the first freedom of expression judgment from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Konaté v. Burkina Faso) and the East African Court of Justice (Burundi Journalists’ Union v. Burundi), and appeared before the Supreme Court of Rwanda to argue international and comparative law standards on freedom of expression and the right to a fair trial.
A Dutch-qualified attorney, Nani graduated in civil law and public international law from the University of Amsterdam and specialised in human rights at Columbia Law School and the European University Institute. She has developed and delivered training sessions on freedom of expression and human rights litigation to dozens of lawyers from several diverse jurisdictions, including India, Russia, Cambodia, Hungary, Botswana and Croatia.
Nani is a member of the project board of the Public Interest Litigation Project and strategic adviser to GQUAL, campaign for gender parity in international representation. Nani speaks English, Dutch, French and Italian.
H R DIPENDRA
Dipendra is a lawyer by training has more than 16 years of experience in the area of dispute resolution. He is also very much involved in initiatives that seek to protect and promote media defense and the freedom of expression with the Southeast Asia region. He has also organised and participated in projects that include training of lawyers and media activists in the Southeast Asia region, trial observer missions and other case interventions.
Dipendra was the 2013 to 2015 Chair of the Kuala Lumpur Bar and the chair of Professional Standards and Development Committee at the Malaysian Bar Council. He is also the 2016 Co-Chair of the International Malaysian Law Conference and a member of the Malaysian Bar Council Human Rights Committee and the Innovation and Future Law Committee. Dipendra holds an LL.M from the London School of Economics and Political Science and practices in a partnership under the name Messrs Arianti Dipendra Jeremiah in Kuala Lumpur.
MARK PARSONS
Mark is a Partner at Hogan Lovells (Hong Kong office). His practice focuses on strategic corporate-commercial and regulatory work in the technology, media and telecommunications sectors and in retail. Mark is a leading expert on Asia-Pacific region data privacy and cyber security laws and regulations and is recognized as a leading TMT practitioner in Chambers Asia Pacific and Legal 500 Asia Pacific.
Mark is admitted as a solicitor in Hong Kong and in England and Wales, as a barrister and solicitor in Ontario, Canada and as a registered foreign lawyer in Singapore. He has been appointed to a two year term on the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data’s Standing Committee on Technological Developments.
In addition to holding a JD from the University of Toronto, Mark also has a Bachelor of Applied Science in engineering from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in computer simulation and process design.
LOUISE CRAWFORD
Louise Crawford is a Foreign Legal Assistant at Hogan Lovells (Hong Kong office). She is a member of the TMT team in Hong Kong. She is qualified as a solicitor in Scotland and England & Wales and has lived in Hong Kong since 2012.
Louise has experience in a broad range of technology and commercial work, including data protection and cybersecurity, outsourcing, commercial contracts and technology regulatory work. Having previously worked in the UK, Dubai and Singapore, Louise has gained experience in a broad spectrum of TMT work in Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific and has advised from both the customer and supplier perspective. She has worked with clients from the technology, financial services, insurance, healthcare, airline and retail industries.
Louise also has in-house IT legal experience, having spent a year working in the technology legal team of a global bank advising on IT, commercial contracts and outsourcing regulatory work in APAC.
GAYATHRY VENKITESWARAN
Gayathry is a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. Her research focus is on media reforms in Southeast Asia. She also works with the Toronto-based International Freedom of Expression Exchange to monitor freedom of expression issues in Asia and the Pacific. Prior to this, she was Executive Director of the Bangkok-based Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) for five years, working on press freedom and access to information in the region. Before joining SEAPA, she headed and was co-director of the Malaysian press freedom organisation, the Centre for Independent Journalism for seven years, had a stint as a journalist for five years and taught media history and journalism in a number of private colleges and universities. She has an MA (International Relations) from the Australian National University and a Bachelor of Mass Communication from University Sains Malaysia.
DANNY GITTINGS
Danny is an Associate Professor and Senior Programme Director in the College of Humanities and Law of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Professional and Continuing Education and author of Introduction to the Hong Kong Basic Law, a widely-used textbook now in its second edition. He is also a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong.
Before joining the academic world, Danny worked in senior editorial positions at the South China Morning Post and The Wall Street Journal Asia for 15 years, where he won several journalistic awards and reported on constitutional and political developments in Hong Kong. He regularly hosts RTHK’s popular Backchat radio talk-show programme, and is one of very few people to have interviewed every Hong Kong leader from Lord Wilson (who was Governor from 1987-1992) through to CY Leung (who became Chief Executive in 2012).
Danny has lived in Hong Kong for more than 25 years and is married with two young children, who are being educated through the local school system.
CLIFF BUDDLE
Cliff is a senior editor with the South China Morning Post. He has more than 30 years experience as a journalist specialising in law and legal affairs. Cliff has been teaching law for 16 years.
He began his career as a news agency reporter at the Central Criminal Court in London, providing stories for the national media. Cliff was brought to Hong Kong by the South China Morning Post in 1994 and, as a chief court reporter, covered landmark constitutional cases following Hong Kong’s return to China. He has served as deputy editor of the newspaper and also acting editor-in-chief.
Cliff passed the Common Professional Examination with HKU SPACE/Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000. He obtained a masters degree in Human Rights Law with the University of Hong Kong in 2000. His dissertation was on the law underpinning Hong Kong’s political system. Cliff lectures on media law for the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong and teaches Hong Kong Legal System, Hong Kong Basic Law and European Union Law for HKU SPACE.
DOREEN WEISENHAUS
Doreen teaches media law and ethics. Prior to joining the Journalism and Media Studies Centre in 2000, she was city editor of The New York Times. She also was the first legal editor of The New York Times Magazine before becoming its law and politics editor. Before that, Doreen was editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal, a leading publication for lawyers in the U.S. that won several major journalism awards during her tenure.
She also was a prosecutor in New York City, a television news producer in Chicago and a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. She holds a Juris Doctor degree from Northwestern University’s School of Law and a Bachelor of Science degree from the Medill School of Journalism, also at Northwestern.
She is the author of Hong Kong Media Law: A Guide for Journalists and Media Professionals (Hong Kong University Press 2007) and an expanded second edition in 2014. Her forthcoming book, Media Law and Policy in the Internet Age, will be published by Hart Publishing Oxford in 2016.
Her research interests include international press freedom and worldwide trends in media law and policy.
Since 2014, she has served as a member of the expert panel and working group for Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression Project.
SIMON YOUNG
Professor Simon Young is Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong and a practising Hong Kong barrister. For more information see http://www.law.hku.hk/faculty/staff/young_simon.php