Global Summit for Democracy 2022 - European Regional Forum

Zsolt Szolnoki currently serves as Secretary General for the Association of the European Election Officials on a voluntarily basis, providing leadership to the Secretariat’s work. He manages the annual conferences, supervises the projects’ preparations, the agendas for the Executive Board and the General Assembly meetings. His areas of expertise include planning for the elections, e-voting, election observations and supervisions, project management and design. He started to work for the ACEEEO in 1995, when he organized the annual conference in Siófok, Hungary. Since this year, he organized and attended all ACEEEO annual conference and Executive Board meeting. At the end of the nineties, he prepared several large observation missions to the Balkan region. In 2000, he worked for the OSCE Mission to Kosovo providing expertise for the preparatory work of the first election in Kosovo. He represented the ACEEEO as an international expert in many conferences and seminars. In his professional capacity between 1993 and 2002 he worked for the Hungarian National Election Office as the Deputy Head of the Election Department. From 2002 to 2005 he served as Head of IT department in the Ministry of Interior. From 2006 till November 2010 he worked for the European Commission as a Seconded National Expert on the area of Home Affairs.  In 2011 he was the Chairman of a working group in the Hungarian EU Presidency team. Currently he is a high counselor in the Ministry of Interior of Hungary. He holds a BA in Public Administration and completed a post graduate course in Business Management.

Zsolt Enyedi is Professor at the Political Science Department of Central European University. He (co)authored two and (co)edited eight volumes and published numerous articles and book chapters, mainly on party politics and political attitudes. His articles appeared in journals such as European Journal of Political Research, Political Studies, Political Psychology, West European Politics, East European Politics, Party Politics, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Democratization, Journal of Legislative Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Social Thought and Research, Journal of Political Ideologies, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures and European Review.

Zsolt Enyedi was the 2003 recipient of the Rudolf Wildenmann Prize and the 2004 winner of the Bibó Award. He held research fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Kellogg Institute (Notre Dame University), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and Johns Hopkins University. In 2020-2021 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. His latest book, written with Fernando Casal Bertoa, entitled Party System Closure came out in 2021 at Oxford University Press.

In 2019, Bano was nominated as International Gender Champion for her persistent international advocacy in promoting for women rights and gender equality. Her work has been contributing to shaping the agenda of Beijing+25 and UNSCR 1325 on the issue of Global Gender Electoral Disparity in Eurasia for over 20 years. In 2020 she was proclaimed the fourth inspirational woman by Think Tank Hub Geneva, an initiative undertaken by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

Since the foundation of Gender Concerns International in 2004, Ms. Bano has been engaged in highlighting the strength, resilience, and status of women in Central & South Asia and the MENA region, in collaboration with the United Nations, European Union, and national stakeholders.

Ms. Bano has designed and launched the Gender Election Observation Mission (GEOM)– the first of its kind to exclusively asses elections from a gender perspective – and has campaigned for genderbased electoral reform, especially addressing the issue of Electoral GBV, internationally, including countries like Pakistan, Tunisia, Morocco and The Netherlands.

Reflected through the work of Gender Concerns International, she specializes in the areas like Gender and Democracy, Gender and Environmental Sustainability and Gender and Crisis Response. She has initiated and led the work in drafting of a gender-sensitive constitution in Libya by engaging regional and local women leaders and experts. During the Katowice-Poland COP24 UN Climate Change Conference, Bano organized side events promoting instruments that link gender-inclusive human and environmental security with the sustainable development. Moreover, as a response to the Covid19 outbreak Bano set up the #Shecarescovid19 program drawing attention to women`s global leadership role in dealing with crisis situation. On International Women`s Day 2022 she invited partner women leaders from Ukraine to highlight the significance of their role and position in facilitating the effective international humanitarian assistance.

Maria Diaz Crego is a policy analyst at the European Parliamentary Research Service’s (Citizens' Policies Unit), currently working on EU institutional and constitutional affairs. Before joining the European Parliament, she was Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Alcala (Spain) and Visiting Fellow at several other Universities and research institutes, among which Harvard Law School (Boston, USA), the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg, Germany), the Hastings College of Law (San Francisco, USA), and the Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). She holds a Ph.D in Law (Doctor Europeus) from the Complutense University in Madrid (Spain), conducting part of her doctoral research at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy).

Dr. Seung Kim comes from political science educational background. He studied at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand where he obtained his PhD, Master’s degree and bachelor’s degree with Honours in Political Science. He first began his career in the A-WEB Secretariat as a researcher. His main duty was to collect electoral data from A-WEB’s member states and do research on the electoral management system of each member EMB. As a political scientist, his research interests cover many aspects of politics, including democratization, electoral politics, nationalism, and international cooperation in the field of election. He is currently working at the office of Secretary General and assisting the Secretary General in developing new projects and making policies. He is also a member of the editorial board of the A-WEB India Journal of Elections.

Dr. Annette Monika Fath-Lihic is, since 2017, the Chief Political Adviser/Executive Coordinator with the European Union Special Representative (EUSR) in Kosovo (seconded by the German Foreign Ministry). She is also an Assisting Professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’ Anna in Pisa, Italy, and lectures at the University of Malta. Prior to joining the EU, she was seven years the Senior Programme Manager for Electoral Processes with International IDEA in Stockholm, Sweden.

Annette has worked in many conflict zones such as the Balkans, Sudan, Liberia and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, since 1994 for IOM, EU, OSCE, and the UN. In addition to electoral issues, she possesses strong knowledge and understanding of policy work in (post) crisis areas of sustainable development governance and international humanitarian law, human rights and international relations. Annette is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), Geneva, Switzerland, and the Scuola Superiore Sant’ Anna in Pisa, Italy.

She holds a PhD in Modern History and International Law from the University of Mannheim, Germany, a Master degree in Humanitarian Assistance from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and a Master degree in Conflict Research and German Philology from the Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, and University of Mannheim, Germany.

Annette is a German citizen.

Gio Kobakhidze is the Deputy Country Director for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in Ukraine and is IFES’ global technical lead on civic education. Kobakhidze has 12 years of experience in the democracy and governance field, with postings in the United States, Ukraine, and Georgia, along with deployments to Tunisia and Ethiopia. Kobakhidze has spearheaded efforts to expand civic education efforts worldwide and has spoken at international symposia throughout central and eastern Europe on the importance of civic education in the digital age.  He is currently stationed with IFES in Ukraine where he oversees multifaceted projects designed to advance Ukrainian democracy by encouraging consensus-based electoral and political finance reform; strengthening the electoral cycle; combatting political corruption; and fostering democratic citizenship through civic education.

Emese Szilagyi is a junior research fellow in the Institute for Legal Studies, Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. She has a large number of publications in the field of human rights, party- and campaign financing, political rights, including the right to vote and the right to referendum. Ms Szilagyi is an expert on election laws, with a special focus on party- and campaign financing. She served in the recent Hungarian elections as campaign finance analyst assistant for OSCE ODIHR Election Mission. Ms. Szilagyi conducted international research on Horizon 2020 “populism project” on referendums and populism. Additionally, she authored a number of policy papers in the field of civil participation and open society.

Daniel Smilov is a political scientist and a comparative constitutional lawyer. He is Programme Director of the Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia and  Associate Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Political Science at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski ”.He holds doctorates from the Central European University in Budapest (SJD, 1999) and the University of Oxford (DPhil, 2003). He has specialized at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law and the European University Institute, Florence. He has also been recurrent visiting professor at the Legal Studies Department of the Central European University.Daniel Smilov has published numerous academic publications in the fields of constitutional law, political finance and anti-corruption policy. As a political commentator, he is a regular contributor to Bulgarian and international media. 

Susi Dennison is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and director of ECFR’s European Power programme. In this role, she explores issues relating to strategy, cohesion, and politics to achieve a collective EU foreign and security policy. Her most recent publications at ECFR include ‘A certain idea of Europe’ with Tara Varma (February 2022),  ‘Climate of cooperation: How the EU can help deliver a green grand bargain’, with Alex Clark and Mats Engstrom (October 2021), the climate chapter of ‘The Power Atlas’ with Alex Clark (December 2021), and ‘Crisis of confidence: How Europeans see their place in the world’ with Jana Puglierin (June 2021).

Filip Pazderski - A lawyer and sociologist after studies at University of Warsaw, he has also graduated from European Master’s Degree Program in Human Rights and Democratization (E.MA) in Venice. Senior Policy Analyst and Head of the Democracy and Civil Society Program of the Institute of Public Affairs (Warsaw based non-partisan think tank organisation), where he works on civil society, civic education, public participation, quality of democracy and rule of law. He carried out research and wrote reports for such institutions as OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, European Economic and Social Committee, International IDEA, Open Society European Policy Institute (OSEPI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), Office of the Senate of the Republic of Poland, Polish Ministry of Labour and Social Policy and Educational Research Institute. He was a coordinator of the transparency of financing of Polish local elections 2014 campaign monitoring, when he cooperated with a group of more than 50 long-term volunteer observers. He is also a vice-President of the European Civic Forum (ECF), a European network of over 100 civic organisations and a consultant to the Council of Europe in the field of civic education and participation.

Sarah Birch is a Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Her research interests include electoral integrity and electoral violence, public ethics, and the political effects of climate change. Her most recent book is Electoral Violence, Corruption and Political Order (Princeton University Press, 2021) and she has published in journals including Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods and the Journal of Peace Research.

János Tamás Papp was born in 1990 in Miskolc. After graduating successfully, he continued his studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Law and Political Science. He obtained his law degree there, in 2014 and after completing his doctoral studies, he earned his PhD in 2022.He started working at the Institute of Media Studies of the Media Council of the National Media and Communications Authority in 2014, and since 2022 he has been working as a legal expert in the Department of Online Platforms. He has been teaching at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University since 2015, but has also taught at Eötvös Loránd University, Milton Friedman University, the National University of Public Administration, the Bibó István College for Advanced Studies and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium.His main areas of research are the impact of social media on democracy and freedom of speech, and the civil- and constitutional-law issues raised by online platfroms’ terms of use. His monograph, titled „The Regulation of Social Media in Protection of the Democratic Discourses” will be published by Wolters Kluwer at the end of June.

After serving as an Assistant Attorney General in the consumer protection unit of the Missouri Attorney General's Office and as Deputy Director of Elections in the Missouri Secretary of State's Office, Brianna Lennon made the decision to pursue election administration at the local level. She was elected county clerk in Boone, Missouri, in 2018, making her responsible for conducting elections for more than 120,000 registered voters.

Eric Fey is a lifelong resident of St. Louis County, Missouri, who fell in love with election administration as a teenage poll worker. He has worked in the field for a decade, and became director of elections in 2015. He’s on the executive board of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities, and has observed elections in twelve countries, including Ukraine, Sri Lanka, and Uzbekistan.

Together, Brianna and Eric host the elections-administration podcast, https://www.kbia.org/podcast/high-turnout-wide-margins which launched in January, 2021. Across 60 episodes (and counting), they talk to subject-matter elections experts and local election administrators to ask the questions that are most meaningful to their work and talk with colleagues about how to best approach issues like voter education, cybersecurity, and integrity.