In alphabetic order:


Tariq Ali is a British author, film-maker and journalist. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and regularly contributes to The Guardian, Counterpunch, and the London Review of Books. Ali emigrated to England because of an imminent imprisonment after his public protest against the Pakistani military dictatorship. There he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. At the end of the 60s he became one of the most important leaders and progressive thinkers of the international student movement. Ali is also a successful filmmaker and author who consistently deals with the conflicts between Western societies and his Islamic home land in his work.


Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of both the “Transnational Institute” and the “Institute for Policy Studies” in Washington DC. She is a journalist specializing in Middle East and United Nations issues. Bennis works closely with the “United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition”, and since 2002 she has played an active role in the growing global peace movement.


Noam Chomsky is professor for linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a political activist and author. He developed the generative grammar theory and the Chomsky hierarchy which has been named after him, a classification of formal languages. His work represents a milestone for linguistics. Besides his linguistic work he is considered to be one of the most important left political intellectuals in North America . Since the Vietnam war he is known as a sharp critic of the US-American foreign and economic policy world wide. He is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.


Jeremy Corbyn is a British Labour Party politician and Member of Parliament for Islington North. He has been in the House of Commons since he won his seat at the 1983 general election. He has a weekly column in The Morning Star. As a long-time supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he is one of its three vice-chairs. He is an elected member of the Stop the War Coalition steering committee as well as the Vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Corbyn is a Amnesty International member.


Wolfgang Gehrcke was member of the German Bundestag for the PDS from 1998 to 2002, assistant chairman of the parliamentary group, its speaker with regard to foreign affairs and the member of the committee on foreign relations. Gehrcke was member of the party executive committee of the Linkspartei.PDS from October 2002 and speaker for foreign policy and international cooperation. He is also founder member of the European Left. Since 1968 Gehrcke has carried out different occupational activities in the publishing sector, as a journalist and in political offices. Gehrcke had been a member of the former PDS from 1990. He had been the General-Secretary of the PDS from 1991 to 1993 and assistant party chairman from 1993 to 1998. Since 2005 Gehrcke is a member of the German Bundestag again and since June 2007 he is member of the party executive committee of DIE LINKE as well as its speaker for foreign policy and international cooperation.


Joseph Gerson is Director of American Friends Service Committee’s Peace and Economic Security Program in New England. He is a public intellectual and leading figure in the U.S. peace movement. Gerson’s work focuses on U.S. hegemony and resistance to it, on the Middle East, Asia, and nuclear weapons. He helped launch the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Freeze and Post-9-11 peace movements and works closely with peace movements in Asia and Europe. He has taught at the Holy Cross and Regis Colleges and at Tufts University.


Kate Hudson is Head of Social and Policy Studies at London South Bank University. She edits the journal “Contemporary Politics” and serves on the editorial board of the “Slavonic and East European Review”. Hudson is also chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) since September 2003.


Bianca Jagger is a British-Nicaraguan social and human rights advocate, environmentalist, former actress, and fashion icon of the 1970s. Jagger is a Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador, Chair of the World Future Council, Chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, and a member of the Executive Director’s Leadership Council of Amnesty International US.


Lysiane Rolet is a lawyer and member of the executive committee of Attac France. She contributed to the establishments of the local social forum in Florence and of the “European Social Forum” (ESF). She leads the group “Genre and Globalization” of Attac France, which offers the opportunity to carry out own actions, whether with the European Parliament or Campaigns like “No to the EU-constitution treaty” (TCE). Rolet participated at the coordination of the demonstration against the Bolkenstein directive.


Jan Tamás is the spokesperson of the No Bases Initiative, »Ne základnám«,a coalition against the proposed US missile system in Eastern Europe.


Hannelore Tölke studied Business Administration in Münster (Germany) and is actively involved at ver.di. She is member of the steering committee of ver.di’s site group Postbank.
Since the beginning of the 80s she has been also involved in the peace movement, for example as a member of the “Deutscher Friedensrat”. Since 2005 she is one of three speakers on federal state level of the “Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten” (VVN-BdA) North Rhine-Westphalia and a member of VVN-BdA’s national committee.


Sophie Zafari is a teacher and international representative of the FSU (Fédération Syndicale Unitaire – labour union for education), France.


Jean Ziegler is a Swiss sociologist, politician and non-fiction book author. By the end of 1999 he was a Geneva delegate in the Swiss parliament for the social democrats. From 2000 to 2008 he was Special Rapporteur on the right to food – initially by order of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, later by the Human Rights Council – as well as a member of the UN-Task-Force for humanitarian help in Iraq. On March 26th, 2008 Ziegler has been elected as a member of the advisory board of the Human Rights Council. He is also in the advisory board of the civil and human rights organization Business Crime Control.