Ahmed Shaheed, PhD, is Professor in the Essex Law School and Human Rights Centre and an Academic Affiliate of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford. He directs the Essex Religion and Equality Project and co-directs the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project. His areas of expertise include human rights implementation, countering hate speech, human rights impacts of emerging technologies, freedom of religion or belief, securitization of minorities, and human rights diplomacy. He has made ground-breaking contributions on combatting antisemitism and islamophobia, and on protecting the freedom of thought. He chairs the Universal Rights Group, and the Essex Human Rights 30 Forum. He has served two mandates as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, first on Iran from 2011-2016, and later on religious freedom, from 2016-2022. Since 2014, he has served as a member of the advisory committee on countering religious hatred at the UN Office on Genocide Prevention. He is currently in his second term as a member of the Panel of Experts advising the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on freedom of religion or belief and is also currently a member of the OSCE advisory board on security and religious freedom. A career diplomat, he served as Maldives’ Foreign Minister from 2005-2010 and played key roles in Maldives’ democratic transition of 2008 and in the sweeping human rights reforms that started in 2003. He is a graduate of the University of Aberystwyth, UK and the University of Queensland, Australia.