The Trustees
The Trustees are Sigrid Rausing (chair), Joshua Mailman, Susan Hitch, Andrew Puddephatt and Geoffrey Budlender.
Sigrid Rausing is a publisher and philanthropist. She founded the Sigrid Rausing Trust in 1995 to support Human Rights internationally.
In 1993-4 she lived on a collective farm in Estonia doing fieldwork for a PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London, followed by a two-year honorary fellowship in the same department. Her book, History, Memory and Identity in Post Soviet Estonia: the End of a Collective Farm, was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, and was preceded by a number of scholarly articles in a range of academic journals.
In 2005 she co-founded the publishing house Portobello Books with her husband, film and theatre producer Eric Abraham, and the publisher, Philip Gwyn Jones. The same year she bought Granta Publications from the New York publisher, Rea Hederman. She is the publisher of Granta magazine, and chairs the board of Granta Publications.
In 2004 she was the joint winner of the International Service Human Rights Award, in the Global Human Rights Defender category. In 2005 she won a Beacon Special Award for philanthropy. In 2006 she was awarded the Women’s Funding Network, ‘Changing the Face of Philanthropy’ Award.
She is a member of the jury of the Per Anger Prize for human rights defenders, and the Order of the Teaspoon, a Swedish organisation against political and religious extremism. She was the judge of the Amnesty Media Awards in 2009 and 2010. She serves on the advisory board of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and is an Emeritus member of the international board of Human Rights Watch. She is a trustee of Charleston, former home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. In 2010 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics.
She is a regular contributor to the New Statesman.
Joshua Mailman is a trustee of the Mailman Foundation in New York, and an advisor to the Pema Fund in San Francisco. He has played an instrumental role in the founding of numerous organisations focused on business and social responsibility, including Social Venture Network (1987), Business for Social Responsibility (1992) and Social Venture Network Europe (1993). He is also the founder of the Threshold Foundation (1981) and a co-founder of the Network for Social Change UK (1983).
He currently serves on the boards of Afropop Worldwide, Business for Social Responsibility, Fund for Global Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Sierra Madre Alliance and Witness. He is a co-founder of Grameen Telecom, the largest cellular operator in Bangladesh and the only phone company in the world one-third owned by a bank that represents the interests of the poor.
Susan Hitch manages Lord Sainsbury of Turville's pro bono projects. She is a trustee of the Institute for Philanthropy, a member of the Commission on Unclaimed Assets, and was Chair of the Balance Foundation. She is a former Fellow in English of Magdalen College, Oxford, and presenter on BBC Radio Three's Nightwaves, specialising in culture and the arts. She also taught at the University of Gdansk for the British Council and has a strong interest in Central and Eastern Europe. She is a trustee of the Gate Theatre and of the Orlando Consort.
Andrew Puddephatt is Co-Director of Global Partners & Associates, a social purpose company that promotes democracy and human rights. He is also Co-Director of Global Dialogue, a charity registered in the UK. Prior to this he was the Executive Director of ARTICLE 19 from January 1999 to October 2004. He has held a number of other prominent human rights positions, including Director of Charter88 and General Secretary of Liberty. He has been an expert member of both the Council of Europe and the Commonwealth Expert working groups on freedom of information and freedom of expression. He chairs a number of other organisations or their boards, including International Media Support, a Danish-based NGO which provides emergency support to journalists in conflict areas, the Audit Committee for the UK's Parliamentary Ombudsman, and CAADA, a leading domestic violence charity in the UK. In January 2003 Andrew was awarded an OBE for services to human rights.
Geoff Budlender is an advocate (barrister) practising in Cape Town, South Arica. He works mainly in the areas of constitutional law, human rights, administrative law, and other aspects of public law.
In 1979 he was one of the founders of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), South Africa’s leading public interest law centre. He litigated cases dealing with freedom of movement, forced evictions, citizenship, detention without trial, and fair labour practices. He was National Director of the LRC from 1994 to 1996.
With the advent of democracy he advised the new government on the creation of new legal frameworks for land reform, water rights, and the structure of the legal profession. In 1996 he was appointed Director-General of the Department of Land Affairs in the Mandela administration. He held that post until January 2000. He then re-joined the LRC, where he was Director of its Constitutional Litigation Unit.
Since 1994 he has litigated cases dealing with the death penalty, evictions, HIV/AIDS, housing rights, land rights, access to justice, and the rights of women under customary law. He appears regularly in the Constitutional Court.
He was one of the founders of the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net), and has served on the boards of several non-governmental organisations. He has consulted to the Ford Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropies. He has acted as a judge of the High Court of South Africa in Johannesburg and Cape Town.