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Panel of Judges - 2018 Global Media Competition on Labour Migration

Maria Teresa Rojas

Maria Teresa Rojas is the director of programs for the International Migration Initiative, which she established as the founding director in 2010. She has previously held several other positions at OSF, including director of the US immigrant rights portfolio, deputy director of the US Justice Fund, and associate director for communications.

Rojas has a varied background in management and communications in the nonprofit and public sectors, and has successfully structured and managed start-up operations. As the first general manager of New York City’s Crosswalks Television. Network, she built five municipal cable channels from the ground up and instituted unprecedented television coverage of local government proceedings. She has been a television producer, radio correspondent, writer, and a New York Emmy nominee.

She is currently a member of the Advisory Committee of the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales, and a member of the Migration Advisory Board of the International Organization for Migration.

Philippe Leruth

Philippe Leruth is the president of the International Federation of Journalism. Journalist at the daily newspaper L’Avenir, Philippe Leruth was vice-president of the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the European group of the IFJ, from 2004 to 2013, and AGJPB president from 1995 to 2005. He was also President of the Belgian Association of Journalists from 1995 to 2005.

The IFJ, the world's largest organisation of journalists, represents 600,000 media professionals from 187 trade unions and associations in more than 140 countries. Established in 1926, the IFJ is the organisation that speaks for journalists within the United Nations system and within the international trade union movement.

Ismail Ferdous

Ismail Ferdous is a National Geographic photographer was born in Dhaka Bangladesh, and presently lives in New York. Ferdous covers social and humanitarian issues. He began his photo and video advocacy project, “The Cost of Fashion”, after documenting the Rana Plaza factory collapse, the worst industrial disaster in history. He continued working on same issue with “After Rana Plaza” project, continuing to spread awareness about the fashion industry and its negative effects on workers in Bangladesh. Ferdous is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. His works have been exhibited all around the world.

Zahera Harb

Zahera Harb is Senior Lecturer in International Journalism at City, University of London. She is the author of Channels of Resistance: Liberation Propaganda, Hezbollah and the Media (I.B. Tauris 2011), co-editor (with Dina Matar) of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (I.B. Tauris 2013) and editor of Reporting the Middle East, the Practice of News in the 21st Century (I.B. Tauris 2017). Board membership include the Ethical Journalism Network (trustee) and UK broadcast regulator OFCOM’s content board.

She is Associate editor of Journalism Practice and member of editorial boards of several academic journals including Journalism and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Zahera was a TV journalist in her native country Lebanon reporting for local and international organisations and anchoring news and current affairs programmes. She has been member of Thomson Foundation expert team as consultant and media trainer since 2007. She has been sitting on the Royal Television Society Journalism Awards jury for three consecutive years. Zahera was finalist for the UK Asian Women of Achievement Awards 2018.