ECOSOC Special Meeting on Inequality 30 March 2016

Biographies of Participants

Oh Joon

Seventy-first President of the Economic and Social Council

Ambassador Oh Joon is the Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Republic of Korea to the United Nations in New York. He is serving as the President of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) for a one year term, starting July 24, 2015. In addition, he serves as the President of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). He also served as President of the Security Council for May 2014 during the 2013-2014 term. Prior to this position, he was Ambassador of the Republic of Korea in Singapore from 2010-13 and Deputy Minister for Multilateral and Global Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Seoul from 2008-10. He has served as Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative at the Permanent Mission of Korea to the United Nations in New York, Chairman of the United Nations Disarmament Commission (UNDC), Deputy Chef de Cabinet for the President of the General Assembly, Director-General for International Organizations at the Korean Foreign Ministry, Special Adviser to the Foreign Minister (2007-08); Minister, ROK Embassy in Brazil (2002-03); Deputy Director-General for Policy Planning (1999-2001); Counselor, ROK Embassy in Malaysia (1997-99); and Director, United Nations Division (1995-97). The ROK Government awarded him an Order of Service Merit twice, first the Order of Green Stripes in 1996 and the Order of Yellow Stripes in 2006.

Jan Eliasson

Deputy Secretary-General, United Nations

Mr. Eliasson was from 2007-2008 the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Darfur. Prior to this, he served as President of the 60th session of the UN General Assembly. He was Sweden’s Ambassador to the US from September 2000 until July 2005. In March 2006, Mr. Eliasson was appointed Foreign Minister of Sweden and served in this capacity until the elections in the fall of 2006. Mr. Eliasson served from 1994 to 2000 as State Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He was Sweden’s Ambassador to the UN in New York 1988- 92, and also served as the Secretary-General’s Personal Representative for Iran/Iraq. Mr. Eliasson was the first UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. He has been a Visiting Professor at Uppsala University and Gothenburg University in Sweden, lecturing on mediation, conflict resolution and UN reform. He also served as a member of the UN Secretary-General’s Advocacy Group of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Rebecca Kadaga

Speaker of the Parliament, Uganda

The Rt. Hon. Rebecca Alitwala Kadaga is a Ugandan lawyer and politician who has been Speaker of the Parliament of Uganda since 19 May 2011. She is the first female to be elected Speaker in the history of the Parliament in Uganda. Between 1984 and 1988, she was in private law practice. From 1989 until 1996, she served as the Member of Parliament for Kamuli District in the District Woman's Constituency, a position which she still holds. She served as the Chairperson of the University Council for Mbarara University between 1993 and 1996. In 1996, she served as Secretary General of the East African Women Parliamentarians Association. From 1996 until 1998, Rebecca Kadaga was the Ugandan Minister of State for Regional Cooperation (Africa and the Middle East). She then served as Minister of State for Communication and Aviation from 1998 until 1999. Between 1999 and 2000 she was the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs. She was elected Deputy Speaker of Parliament in 2001, a position that she held until 19 May 2011, when she was elected Speaker of Parliament. Among her duties as speaker of the Ugandan Parliament, she chairs the following parliamentary committees: the Appointments Committee, the Parliamentary Commission and the Business Committee.

Han Seung-soo

Former Prime Minister, Republic of Korea

Dr. Han Seung-soo has more than five decades of academic, political, and diplomatic experience. He was Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea from 2008 to 2009 and the President of the fifty-sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly from 2001 to 2002. Dr. Han was first elected to the National Assembly in 1988, served as the Ambassador to the United States from 1993 to 1994, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2001 to 2002.

Dr. Han has previously also served as the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General on Climate Change, a member of the Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, and Chair of the High-level Experts and Leaders Panel on Water and Disasters. In 2013, he was appointed as the Special Envoy for Disaster Risk Reduction and Water.

Ali Velshi

Journalist and television host, Al Jazeera America

Mr. Velshi’s career started when he joined the ‘CFTO’ channel in Toronto as a General Assignment Reporter. In 1999, he worked for a business channel now known as BNN-Business News Network. He travelled to the United States in 2001, and started working with ‘CNNfn’ then the ‘CNN’ network as a host and reporter. He covered among others the bombing of the ‘Marriott Hotel’ in Islamabad, the striking of the destructive hurricane ‘Gustav and the 2008 financial crisis. He left ‘CNN’ and started working for the newly launched television channel ‘Al Jazeera America’, in 2013. Here, he is the anchor of the show titled ‘Real Money with Ali Velshi’.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

French philosopher, journalist, filmmaker, and public intellectual

In 1968 Mr. Lévy entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied under Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. He published books on several political, strategic and military situations including a Report to the President as an envoy of President Jacques Chirac in 2002. In the 1970s Mr. Lévy joined André Glucksmann and others in a loose-knit group that became known as the Nouveaux Philosophes (New Philosophers). They launched a severe critique of French Marxism and socialism. His principal contribution to that movement was La Barbarie à visage humain (1977; “Barbarism with a Human Face”). Mr. Lévy made perhaps the clearest statement of his own philosophy in Le Testament de Dieu (1979; The Testament of God ), in which he argued for a humanistic ethics based on a biblical monotheism despite the fact that he was not a believer. He delivered the keynote speech at the informal meeting of the General Assembly on the rise of anti-Semitism.

Thomas Pogge

Director, Global Justice Program, Leitner Professor

Having received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard, Thomas Pogge has published widely on Kant and on moral and political philosophy, including various books on Rawls and global justice. Besides his appointment at CAPPE, he is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, Research Director at the Oslo University Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN), and Adjunct Professor of Political Philosophy at the Centre for Professional Ethics of the University of Central Lancashire. With support from the Australian Research Council, the UK-based BUPA Foundation and the European Commission (7th Framework) he currently heads a team effort towards developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide (www.healthimpactfund.org) and toward developing better indices of poverty and gender equity.

Myrna Cunningham Kain

Activist, Former Chairperson of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (Nicaragua)

After her Master’s Degree in Primary Education, Dr. Cunningham returned to her community of origin to work as a teacher. She then returned to school to study medicine and surgery at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, becoming the first Miskita woman doctor. From 1992-2004 Dr. Cunningham was the founding director of the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast URACCAN, one of the first Latin American experiences of indigenous, intercultural and gender-sensitive higher education. It has served as inspiration for many indigenous people of the continent. She has also been a member of the Board of the Global Fund for Women and advised the Alliance of Indigenous Women and International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI). From 2011-2013, she served as Chair of the Permanent UN Forum on Indigenous Issues. In 2014, she was appointed as Special Ambassador of FAO for the International Year of Family Farming extending her position as Ambassador to 2016. She was Adviser to the President of the General Assembly of the UN World Conference of Indigenous People of the UN in 2014. Dr. Cunningham is currently a member of the Board of Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), The Hunger Project, and a Trust Fund for Indigenous People, Tropical Agricultural Research and the Higher Education Center (CATIE), the Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility (IPAF). She is currently First Vice President of the Board of the Fund for the Development of Indigenous People of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Marc Fleurbaey

Robert E. Kuenne Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies, Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Marc Fleurbaey has been an economist at INSEE (Paris), a professor of economics at the Universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Pau (France), and a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. He has also been a Lachmann Fellow and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, a research associate at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE, Louvain- la-Neuve) and the Institute for Public Economics (IDEP, Marseilles), and a visiting researcher at Oxford. He is a former editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy and as of 2012 is the coordinating editor of Social Choice and Welfare. He is the author of Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare (2008), a co-author

5 of Beyond GDP (with Didier Blanchet, 2013), A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare (with François Maniquet, 2011), and the coeditor of several books, including Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism: Themes from Harsanyi and Rawls (with Maurice Salles and John Weymark, 2008). His research on normative and public economics and theories of distributive justice has focused in particular on the analysis of equality of opportunity and responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism and on seeking solutions to famous impossibilities of social choice theory.

David Nabarro

Special Adviser of the UN Secretary-General on 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Dr. Nabarro has more than 30 years of experience in public health, nutrition and development work at the national, regional and global levels, and has held positions in non-governmental organizations, universities, national governments and the United Nations system. Since September 2014, he has served as Special Envoy of the Secretary-General on Ebola. From 2005 to 2014 he was Senior Coordinator for Avian and Pandemic Influenza. From 2011 to 2015, he served as Coordinator of the Movement to Scale Up Nutrition, and since 2009 he has been the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Food Security and Nutrition, a position he will continue to hold. Dr. Nabarro previously served as Chief Health and Population Adviser to the United Kingdom Overseas Development Administration, and in 1997, he became Director of Human Development in the Department for International Development.

Denise Dresser

Professor of political science, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México

Dr. Dresser has taught comparative politics, political economy, and Mexican politics at ITAM since 1991. In May of 2010, she was awarded the National Journalism Prize (Premio Nacional de Periodismo). She is a prolific writer and a frequent commentator on Mexican politics in the U.S. and Canadian media. She has also worked as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program, Barings Research and the Bank of Montreal. Dr. Dresser has been a member of the Research Council of the Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy, the World Academy of Arts and Science, the advisory board of Trans-National Research Corporation, the editorial board of the Latin American Research Review, the advisory board of Human Rights Watch and others. She is currently on the board of the Human Rights Commission for Mexico City. Dr. Dresser earned her Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller

Foundation, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Center for International Studies at Princeton University, and the Organization of American States. In 1993 she was given the Junior Third World Scholar award by the International Studies Association and has held numerous Senior university fellowships.

Jonathan D. Ostry

Deputy Director of the Research Department (RES), International Monetary Fund

Mr. Ostry’s recent responsibilities include leading staff teams on: IMF-FSB Early Warning Exercises on global systemic macrofinancial risks; vulnerabilities exercises for advanced and emerging market countries; multilateral exchange rate surveillance; international financial architecture and reform of the IMF’s lending toolkit; capital account management (capital controls and prudential tools to manage capital inflows) and financial globalization issues; fiscal sustainability issues; and the nexus between income inequality and economic growth. Past positions include leading the division that produces the IMF’s flagship multilateral surveillance publication, the World Economic Outlook , and leading country teams on Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore. Mr. Ostry is the author/editor of a number of books on international macro policy issues, and numerous articles in scholarly journals. His work on inequality and unsustainable growth has been widely cited, including by President Barack Obama.

Paolo dos Santos

Assistant Professor of Economics, the New School for Social Research

Mr. dos Santos received his PhD in economics from the University of London. His research involves Classical Political Economy; Banking and Monetary Theory; and the role of Finance in Economic Development. Much of his current work enquires into the distinctive social and macroeconomic content of contemporary financial practices and relations. He is interested in methodological issues in economic analysis, including the appropriate use and interpretation of mathematical formalisms.

Michael Elliott

President and Chief Executive Officer, ONE, United Kingdom

Michael Elliott is the President and Chief Executive Officer of ONE, the global campaigning and advocacy organization fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease. Prior to joining ONE in 2011, Elliott had a career in the media. He served as editor of TIME International and Newsweek International, and as Political Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of The Economist, where he was the founding author of the “Bagehot” and “Lexington” columns. Elliott was a columnist on the global economy for Fortune magazine, and has written and presented many television documentaries that have been broadcast all over the world. He is the author of four books. Prior to his career in journalism, he was a member of the Central Policy Review Staff in Britain’s Cabinet Office, and before that, spent eight years teaching in universities in the US and UK, ending his academic career with a tenured position at the London School of Economics. Elliott sits on a number of official advisory committees and boards, including those of InterAction, the International Center for Journalists, and Beyond Sport. He has served as vice-chair and chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Poverty and Sustainable Development.

José Graziano da Silva

Director-General, Food and Agriculture Organisation

In 2001 Mr. da Silva led the team that designed Brazil’s "Zero Hunger" (Fome Zero) programme. In 2003, he was charged with its implementation by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who named him Special Minister of Food Security and the Fight against Hunger. Zero Hunger has helped lift millions out of hunger and extreme poverty by emphasizing social inclusion and linking policies that address macro-economic, social, and productive challenges. Graziano da Silva joined FAO in 2006 as the head of the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean. Serving as Regional Representative until 2011, he actively supported the “Hunger-Free Latin America and the Caribbean Initiative” - which made the region the first in the world to commit to the total eradication of hunger by 2025 - and highlighted the importance of family farming, rural development, and strengthening rural institutions to guarantee food security. Graziano da Silva was elected Director-General of FAO on 26 June 2011 and took up office on 1 January 2012. He has emphasized the importance of addressing the connections between social, economic, and environmental factors that can lead to hunger and malnutrition. He was re-elected for a second 4 year- term (1 August 2015 to 31 July 2019) during FAO's 39th Conference.

Jeffrey Sachs

Director, SDSN, and Director, The Earth Institute, Columbia University, USA

Jeffrey D. Sachs serves as Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development as well as of Health Policy and Management. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Sustainable Development Goals, having held a similar position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. From 2002 to 2006, he was director of the United Nations Millennium Project's work on the Millennium Development Goals. He is director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Since 2010 he also served as a commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Digital Development. Since 1995, he is also a member of the International Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE). From 1995 to 1999 he was director of the Harvard Institute for International Development at the Kennedy School of Government.

Rebeca Grynspan

Secretary-General, Ibero-American Secretariat

Created in 2003 and headquartered in Madrid, the Ibero-American Secretariat brings together the Heads of State and Government of Latin America, Spain, Portugal, and Andorra and other government representatives and civil society in order to advance economic, social, and cultural development among the 22 countries of Latin America plus Spain, Portugal, and Andorra. Before joining the United Nations, Ms. Grynspan was Vice-President of Costa Rica from 1994 to 1998. She also served as Housing Minister, Coordinating Minister of Economy, Coordinating Minister of Social Affairs, and Vice-Minister of Finance. Ms. Grynspan joined UNDP in 2006 as the Assistant-Secretary-General and Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean and was appointed Associate Administrator in 2010. Previously, she was Director of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Sub-regional Headquarters in Mexico, where she also served as Co-Chair of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Executive Board.

Gilbert Houngbo

Deputy Director General for Field Operations and Partnerships, International Labour

Prior to his appointment, from September 2008 to July 2012, Mr. Houngbo was the Prime Minister of Togo. In this capacity he led the government towards substantial improvements in all areas namely: achievement towards the MDGs, rule of law, civil liberties, social cohesion, economic reforms including the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), good governance, improving business climate, agriculture and rural development and shared economic growth.

Other specific areas of expertise include Strategic operational planning and management, financial and human resource management.

Jan Walliser

Vice President, World Bank Global Practices: Finance & Markets, Governance, Macroeconomics & Fiscal Management, Poverty, and Trade & Competitiveness

Mr. Walliser is charged with ensuring high-quality lending and analytical and advisory services aligned with country demand. Prior to his current appointment, he was Director of Strategy and Operations in the Bank’s Africa Region supporting the Regional Vice President in providing strategic leadership and operational support. Previously, he managed a team of economists which advised governments on macroeconomic policies and supported debt relief for several fragile states. He also provided advice to staff and senior management on issues related to budget support, aid effectiveness and conditionality in one of the World Bank’s central units during 2004-08. Before joining the World Bank in 2002, he was an economist at the International Monetary Fund and a Principal Analyst at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office where he focused on the analysis of pension reform and tax reform.

Marcos Bonturi

OECD Director for Global Relations

Mr. Bonturi was previously Deputy Chief of Staff of the Secretary-General of the OECD. In this position, he supported the OSG in preparing tailor-made policy advice ("Better Policies” brochures) for several Member and non-Member countries. Mr. Bonturi joined the OECD in 1990. He started on trade and development issues, including at the Development Centre, the Trade Directorate and the Economics Department. He then worked on a series of structural reform issues, including as a Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist. At the turn of the century, Mr. Bonturi started assuming increasing management responsibilities, first as advisor in the Secretary-General’s office and then as Head of Division in both the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry (STI) and the Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate (GOV). Prior to joining the OECD, Mr. Bonturi was an economist in the Social and Economic Development Department of the Inter-American Development Bank for three years, where he worked on Latin American trade and development policies.