Our People
Our Team
Mai Sato
Mai is the inaugural director of Eleos Justice and her academic focus is on the death penalty. She is a social scientist by training and has led and worked on projects on the death penalty in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. Her monograph The Death Penalty in Japan: Will the Public Tolerate Abolition? (Springer, 2014), and her documentary film which captured a social experiment exploring what the death penalty meant to ordinary Japanese citizens, influenced the decision by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations to become an abolitionist organisation in 2016.
Mai's interest in the death penalty is not limited to scholarly understanding of punishment and the criminal justice system. After completing a European Commission funded project, Mai has created and currently co-runs an NGO CrimeInfo which promotes the abolition of the death penalty in Japan.
Mai has a PhD from King's College London. She relocated to Australia in February 2019 and joined the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. Prior to joining the ANU, she worked at the School of Law, University of Reading; the Centre for Criminology, the University of Oxford; and at the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (UK).
Sara Kowal
Sara is Deputy Director (Practice) at Eleos Justice, as well as Vice-President of the Capital Punishment Justice Project. She has practised exclusively in criminal law since 2003 and has extensive experience in defending complex prosecutions.
In 2018, Sara was appointed to establish the Anti-Death Penalty Clinic at Monash, the first stage of Eleos Justice. The Clinic has been extremely popular with students and has been enthusiastically embraced by our partners.
In November 2019, Sara joined the Executive of the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN). She also sits on three country-specific working groups of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
Reyhaneh Bagheri
Reyhaneh has a PhD (Gender Studies) from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). Upon graduating from PhD, she worked as a Teaching Fellow at USM for two years (2017-2019). In October 2022, she joined the School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) at Monash University Malaysia (MUM). Prior to joining the MUM, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow on abortion law and women’s rights at the National Institute for Population Research (IRAN). She has led and worked on projects on the sexual and reproductive health rights in Iran and Malaysia.
She is an Eleos Justice postdoctoral research fellow and is contributing to the research on death penalty from a gender perspective. Her research interests include gender attitudes towards the death penalty with a particular focus on women on death row and women as co-victims of death penalty, as well as the impact of the death penalty on family members.
Christopher Alexander
Christopher holds an LL.M. in Public International Law from Stockholm University and an LL.B. (Hons) & BA from Monash University. As a researcher, he has co-authored several Eleos Justice publications, including State-Sanctioned Killing of Sexual Minorities: Looking Beyond the Death Penalty (February 2021). Christopher is also a lawyer, providing pro bono legal assistance in asylum claims and death row matters, and teaches criminal law in the Monash University Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) program. He has previously contributed research assistance on a diverse range of human rights-related projects at the Faculty of Law, Monash University and the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University.
Leavides Domingo–Cabarrubias
Leavides Domingo–Cabarrubias obtained her PhD at Monash University Faculty of Law. Her research interest is broadly in the area of international human rights law, with a focus on women’s human rights. She has more than 10 years of experience as an educator, researcher, feminist lawyer and human rights activist. She has worked as lawyer for indigent citizens in the Philippines, a writer/consultant for the Philippine Commission on Human Rights for their national inquiry on extra-judicial killings, and the Philippine Commission on Women for their assessment on the implementation of the anti-violence against women law. She is currently a part of the project team of the Victorian Government-funded Legal Tech for Justice: Enhancing Access to Justice in Family Violence Legal Services. Through her involvement with Eleos Justice, she has contributed research support in the recent publication A Deadly Distraction: Why the Death Penalty is not the Answer to Rape on South Asia, and is currently working on the research on death penalty as torture.
Our Fellows
Jean Allain
Professor Jean Allain research is broadly in the area of international law, with a focus on international human rights and a developed expertise, globally, on legal issues of human exploitation including forced labour and Slavery.
Sally Andersen
Sally Andersen completed her law degree in Western Australia and has practised in a variety of areas, including criminal and commercial law.She has taught in the Law Faculty at Monash University for over 10 years in criminal law, lawyers’ ethics, contract law, foundations of law and torts. She has also been involved in research in consumer law and has also been involved in various programs at Monash, including the Law for Non-Lawyers - Introduction to Law online course. Sally is very passionate about teaching and providing students with the best learning outcomes.
In 2019 Sally was excited to be invited to join Eleos Justices’ Anti-Death Penalty Clinic at Monash Law. She loves being involved in Clinic and supporting the important work being done in the fight against the death penalty. She has brought her passion for teaching into the clinical environment and has been involved in guiding and supervising students in developing and providing casework, research and advocacy briefs for the Clinics’ partners’ across the Asia-Pacific region.
Natalia Antolak-Saper
Dr. Natalia Antolak-Saper is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Monash University.
Her research interests are criminal law and procedure, sentencing and the death penalty. Her death penalty research focusses on fair trial guarantees, drug law reform and deterrence. Her research is notable for being comparative and bringing a socio-legal perspective. Most recently, she co-authored a report for Harm Reduction International entitled 'Drug Offences and the Death Penalty: Fair Trial Rights and Ramifications'.
Her current research agenda includes deterrence and the death penalty, and alternatives to imprisonment for drug offenders.
Richard Bassed
Richard is the Deputy Director and Head of Academic Programs at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, Melbourne, Australia. Richard is also Head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Monash University. He has a bachelor’s degree in dental surgery from the University of Sydney, a Graduate Diploma in Forensic Odontology from the University of Melbourne and a PhD from the Department of Forensic Medicine, Monash University. Richard is a Fellow of the Faculty of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology within the RCPA, and is the course coordinator for the Monash University Masters of Forensic Medicine.
Richard’s research interests include; forensic aspects of post-mortem CT interpretation, personal identification using advanced imaging techniques, improving the evidence base in Forensic Medicine and Science – especially in relation to intentionally inflicted trauma, evidential aspects of bite-mark analysis, and the application of machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to the analysis of forensic medical and scientific evidence.
Ryan Beckmand
Ryan is in the extended research phase of his Masters of Law and International Development (LLM) at Monash University, and holds an active research interest in international law and extrajudicial killings.
Through his involvement with Eleos Justice, Ryan has provided research-based support to inform the preliminary vision statement of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. He has also contributed research support in death row cases.
Dobby Chew
Dobby completed his LLM in Law at Birmingham City University and currently serves as the Executive Coordinator for the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN). He has been actively involved in the abolitionist movement, campaigns and advocacy in Malaysia. Apart from his work on the death penalty in Malaysia, Dobby is also a co-founder of Security Matters, an NGO established in 2020 to provide physical and digital support for human rights defenders, as well as a committee member of Liga Rakyat Demoratik.
Dobby’s research interest is on the intersection of culture and human rights. He is currently pursuing a PhD on the topic of cross-border cultural influences on the death penalty among Mandarin-speaking communities.
Stephen Cordner
Stephen works in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University as a Professor.
Karin Frodé
Karin M Frodé is a PhD Candidate and Raydon Scholar at Monash University with external supervision from King’s College London. Her thesis examines the concept of solidarity in international human rights law. Alongside her studies, Karin has been involved in the running of two law clinics, most recently the Monash Afghanistan Support Clinic. She has also supported the Eleos Justice Anti-Death Penalty Clinic with research and drafting pertaining to persons on death row. Alongside two other human rights lawyers, including the former CEO of the Capital Punishment Justice Project, Karin co-founded the Ham Diley Campaign, an informal initiative which has supported the evacuation and resettlement of over 90 individuals at risk of extrajudicial killing and summary execution in Afghanistan. Prior to joining Monash, Karin worked at international human rights organisations in the UK and Thailand and interned at the UN Refugee Agency and ARTICLE 19. She is admitted as an Australian Lawyer and holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Essex (LL.B.) (Hons) and a postgraduate law degree from the University of Oxford (BCL) (Distinction).
Paula Gerber
Paula Gerber is a Professor at Monash University Law School and a leading expert on protecting and promoting the rights of LGBTI persons. She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters on issues relating to persons of diverse genders and sexualities, including, ‘Living a Life of Crime: The Ongoing Criminalisation of Homosexuality within the Commonwealth’ (2014) 39(2) Alternative Law Journal 78 and ‘Protecting the rights of LGBTIQ people around the world: Beyond marriage equality and the decriminalisation of homosexuality’ (2021) Alternative Law Journal. Most recently she edited the 3-volume research series entitled 'Worldwide Perspectives on Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals', published in January 2021.
Professor Gerber is a former member of the Board of the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and is the immediate Past President, and current Director of Kaleidoscope Human Rights Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation working to protect the human rights of LGBTI persons in the Asia-Pacific region.
Fia Hamid-Walker
Fia Hamid-Walker is an international human rights Advocate and a PhD candidate in Law and Critical Disaster Theory at Monash Law. Fia worked with community legal centres as a legal researcher and advocate specialising in administrative law, anti-discrimination, police accountability, and prisoners’ rights. Fia has worked (and still is) on death penalty cases in Indonesia and was a consultant project manager for Capital Punishment Justice Project. Fia is currently working for the Asia-Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, as a human rights defenders officer. Fia completed her Bachelor of law degrees from the University of Airlangga, Indonesia and Monash University, Australia. Fia has a Masters of Development Studies (First Class Honours) from the University of Melbourne.
Nadir Hosen
Nadir Hosen is an academic staff at the Faculty of Law, Monash University, who has conducted research on Islamic law and Indonesian law. Recently, he has involved helping the case of Sakak bin Jamak, who was in death row in Indonesia, along with the Indonesian Legal Aid and Monash Anti Death Penalty Clinic.
Thaatchaayini Kananatu
Thaatchaayini Kananatu is a Senior Lecturer in Global Studies at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research interests include law, gender and race; law and social movements; as well as ethics, human rights and social justice. She is the author of Minorities, Rights and the Law in Malaysia (2020, Routledge), co-editor of Vulnerable Groups in Malaysia (2020, De Gruyter) with Sharon G. M. Koh, and co-editor of Gender and Sexuality Justice in Asia (2020, Springer) with Joseph N. Goh and Sharon A. Bong. She is a Fellow of Eleos Justice which researches on the death penalty in the Asian region. Her past project includes a research collaboration with the Monash Anti-Death Penalty Clinic and the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN) entitled 'Drug offences and the Death Penalty in Malaysia: Fair Trial Rights and Ramifications' (2019).
Souha Korbatieh
Souha Korbatieh is a first year PhD student at Monash researching capital punishment in modern Muslim states. She is seeking to compare Muslim states that impose capital punishment and identify the traditional basis of punishment to consider options for reassessment and limitation within the Islamic legal framework.
Bebe Loff
Associate Professor Bebe Loff is Director of the Michael Kirby Centre for Public Health and Human Rights at Monash University.
Prior to joining Monash University she was responsible for the legislative programmes of Ministers of Health in Victoria. She has worked in various capacities for a number of United Nations agencies including the World Health Organization, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNAIDS. She has been a member of several ethical review committees including that of the World Health Organization, the Australian Health Ethics Committee (a principal committee of the NHMRC). In addition, she was for a time, an Australian correspondent for The Lancet and a regular human rights commentator.
Matt Maycock
Matthew Maycock, PhD, is a senior lecturer in Criminology at Monash University, Melbourne, specialising in teaching research methods and ethics. He was previously a Baxter Fellow in Community Education at the University of Dundee and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, visiting scholar at the Centre for Gender Studies Karlstad University as well as previously working as a researcher in the UK Civil Service. Additionally, he previously worked in public health research as an Investigator Scientist within the Settings and Organisations Team at the University of Glasgow undertaking an evaluation of a public health intervention adapted for prison settings. Matthew undertook his PhD at the University of East Anglia in an ongoing study that analyses modern slavery and experiences of freedom within the Kamaiya community in Nepal. This study uses the theoretical lens of masculinity and resulted in the publication of a monograph for Routledge in 2019. Throughout various studies, Matthew has consistently worked on gender issues with critical studies on men and masculinity being a particular focus. He is the co-editor of four books, sits on the editorial board of three academic journals and is the editor of the International Journal of Prison Health.Jia Vern Tham
Jia Vern completed her BA (Honours) at Monash University Malaysia, and is now a researcher at The Centre, a Malaysian think tank. Her research interests include electoral autocracies, sentencing and the death penalty, as well as intergroup relations. In 2020, she led a Peninsular-wide research project on how Malaysians perceive the death penalty, and uncovered nuances in public opinion towards capital punishment.
Jia Vern is also a first year PhD student at Monash University Malaysia looking into the perceived deterrent effect of the death penalty on drug offences in the country. She is seeking to understand offenders’ motivations and how the risk of capital punishment affects their behaviour, with hopes of exploring alternative sentencing for drug offences in Malaysia.
Scott Walker
Scott is a final year LLB(Hons) student at Monash University. He is currently completing his Honours thesis which critically analyses the international human rights law compatibility of compulsory mental health treatment. Scott currently works as a paralegal in health law assisting in litigated, regulatory, and coronial matters at a global law firm.
In 2021, Scott completed an in-house placement with the Eleos Anti-Death Penalty Clinic. Scott has since been involved in several Eleos Justice projects, most recently providing research assistance to the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in collaboration with the Monash Department of Forensic Medicine. Moving forward, he is interested in pursuing research at the intersection of human rights, health and disability law as well as further work on the death penalty as torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Our Affiliates & Visitors
Lennon Chang
A/Prof Lennon Yao-Chung Chang (Associate Professor, Cyber Risk and Policy, Deakin University) was awarded his PhD in Law from the Regulatory Institutions Network at the Australian National University. He is the Vice Chairman of the Asia Pacific Association of Technology and Society which he co-founded
in 2012. He is also the founder and Director of Cyberbaykin: Myanmar Cyber Security Awareness campaign and a member of the Oceania Cyber Security Centre. His research interests focus on the intersection of law and technology, cybercrime and cyber security, co-production of cyber security, disinformation
campaigns and foreign interference, especially in the Indo-Pacific region. He is currently researching disinformation, co-production of cyber security and internet vigilantism in the Indo-Pacific region. He is also working with governments and NGOs in ASEAN countries on research and training programs
to build cyber security capacity and cyber security awareness. He is often invited by TV and news media, including New York Times, Reuters, ABC, BBC and South China Morning Post, to comment on cybercrime and cyber-attack events.
Before joining Deakin, he was a senior lecture in Criminology at Monash University and an assistant professor in Criminology at City University of Hong Kong. He also worked as a project manager in the Science and Technology Law Centre, Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan.
CHAN Wing Cheong
CHAN Wing Cheong is a Professor at School of Law, Singapore Management University. He teaches and researches mainly in the areas of criminal law and family law, and he has been recognised for his excellence in teaching at the Faculty and University levels. He is the co-author of Criminal Law in Malaysia and Singapore, which is used as a textbook by law students and it has been cited numerous times by the courts of both Malaysia and Singapore. His recent projects include an examination of the death penalty in Singapore, and the criminal laws of Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Wing Cheong completed his undergraduate studies in Law in Oxford University (England) and his Masters degree in Cornell University (USA). He is an advocate and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore, a barrister of Gray's Inn (England & Wales), and a qualified attorney of New York State (USA).
Patrick Emerton
Patrick Emerton researches on a range of topics in constitutional law and theory; legal, social and political philosophy; and the theoretical foundations of international and human right law. His work on just war theory has been published in Philosophy and Public Affairs and in leading collections. That work combines an individualistic morality of self-defence with a rich theory of political institutions to defend a relatively traditional account of the morality of warfare - that is, a high threshold for going to war, together with a defence of the moral equality of soldiers when it comes to killing and the liability to be killed.
Matthew Goldberg
Matthew Goldberg is a barrister and is responsible for leading Eleos Justice's UN Advocacy Project.
In 2019, Matthew was one of Australia’s civil society representatives to the UN Human Rights Council where he worked alongside Australia’s Permanent Mission to the UN in order to secure the Council's adoption of the Resolution on the Question of the Death Penalty.
Matthew is a former president of Reprieve Australia (now the Capital Punishment Justice Project) and he was responsible for expanding the organisation's work to Asia whilst maintaining legacy projects in the US. Mathew has extensive experience working with legal teams in defence of those on death row.
He was a co-founder of the Mercy Campaign, an online movement calling for clemency in death penalty proceedings within Indonesia. More than 250,000 people signed the campaign's petition and Australia's federal parliament was united in its support.
Matthew continues to serve as a board member of the Capital Punishment Justice Project and he is also President of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
Ffion Gorman
Ffion completed her LLB(Hons)/BA at Monash University, and has a background in criminology and human rights. She is currently working at a family violence community legal centre providing culturally safe, sensitive, and accessible services to indigenous women. At Eleos Justice, she has contributed research assistance on the death penalty as a form of torture.
Abdul Rashid Ismail
Abdul Rashid Ismail has been in legal practice for over 20 years at the Malaysian Bar and his areas of practice is corporate and commercial litigation and criminal law. He is the Managing Partner of a law firm in Malaysia, Messrs. Rashid Zulkifli. Rashid dedicates part of his legal practice to human rights work. He has been involved and continues to be involved in landmark constitutional cases involving the mandatory death sentence, the rights to fair trial and the rights of the vulnerable including the mentally ill facing execution. Rashid is also an active participant in human rights advocacy programmes and activities that are geared towards the abolition of the death penalty. His work extends to public awareness programmes, engagements with ministers, government officials, parliamentarians, and civil society. In 2019, Rashid submitted an extensive expert report to the Special Committee on Alternative Sentencing that was set up to look at proposed reforms on death penalty laws in Malaysia and alternative sentencing upon the abolition of the mandatory death penalty. Rashid is a past President of the National Human Rights Society of Malaysia (HAKAM) and he has previously served on the Human Rights Committee of the Malaysian Bar Council for many years.
Michael Hor
Professor Michael Hor specialises in most matters related to criminal justice. He has taught and published in criminal law, evidence, and criminal procedure. He has been a Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, a Distinguished Visitor at the Law Faculty of the University of Toronto, and a Visitor at the Oxford Centre for Criminology. He was Dean of the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong, from 2014 to 2019. He has also been a Consultant to the Ministry of Law, Singapore and the Criminal Practice Committee of the Law Society of Singapore.
Dr Clarke Jones
Dr Jones is a criminologist and senior research fellow based at the School of Medicine and Psychology at the Australian National University (ANU). His expertise includes interventions / rehabilitation, radicalisation / prison radicalisation, correctional reform, and prison gangs. Dr Jones has applied his research to prison and jail reform in the Philippines correctional system and continues to advise Philippines correctional agencies (the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), the Bureau and Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) on areas such as the management of high-risk offenders and prison gangs. In this capacity, he has delivered over 60 workshops, courses, and conferences to the BuCor, the BJMP, and the Parole and Probation Agency. He has also worked as a senior consultant for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Before moving into academia in 2010, he worked for over 15 years in several areas of Australian national security, including police, military, and intelligence. In 2002, he was awarded the Chief of the Australian Defence Force Fellow and, based on 2010.
Samira Lindsey
Samira completed her LLB (Hons), BA (International Relations) and DipLang (Indonesian) at Monash University. Since 2018, Samira has provided research assistance to academics at Monash University’s Faculty Law and Swinburne’s Faculty of Business Law. She is currently working as a barrister’s assistant at the Victorian Bar and as a litigation paralegal in a boutique Melbourne firm.
In 2019, Samira completed an in-house placement with the Monash Anti-Death Penalty Clinic under the supervision of Sara Kowal. She collaborated with Indonesian legal aid lawyers and Australian practitioners on casework and reform advocacy. In 2020, Samira co- authored a publication with Sara Kowal, Dr Natalia Antolak-Saper, Chow-Ying Ngeow and Dr Thaatchaayini Kananatu entitled 'Drug Offences and the Death Penalty in Malaysia: Fair Trial Rights and Ramifications' published by Monash University. Samira is fortunate to have assisted Julian McMahon AC SC on death-row matters. In 2020, she is looking forward to assisting Eleos Justice on a new project examining the elderly on death row and continues to collaborate with Monash University and other NGOs on anti-death penalty initiatives.
Delphine Lourtau
Delphine is a lawyer and international human rights advocate. From 2016 to 2021, Delphine was the inaugural Executive Director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, a research, advocacy, and training center based at Cornell Law School in the United States. She has co-authored several reports on the death penalty and international human rights law, including most recently Judged for More Than Her Crime (2018), the first global overview of gender and capital punishment, and No One Believed Me: A Global Overview of Women Facing the Death Penalty for Drug Offenses (2021). She has also practiced as a civil rights lawyer in the United States, representing victims of police misconduct in the war on drugs at the Chicago firm of Loevy & Loevy. Delphine holds common law and civil law degrees from McGill University, a Masters in Law from New York University, and a Masters in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris.
Maitreyi Misra
Maitreyi is a founding member of Project 39A, a criminal justice initiative at the National Law University Delhi. She is currently Director, Mental Health and Criminal Justice as well as Death Penalty Mitigation at Project 39A. She is the lead author of Project 39A’s report, Deathworthy: A Mental Health Perspective of the Death Penalty. Maitreyi’s work at Project 39A has contributed to progressive changes in death penalty law in India, including the recent trend at the Indian Supreme Court to appoint mitigation investigators in death penalty cases and the pending Constitution Bench referral on what constitutes a 'meaningful, real and effective' hearing in death penalty cases.
She completed her Masters in Law in 2011 from New York University, where she was an International Law and Human Rights Fellow as part of which she worked with the Association of Civil Rights in Tel Aviv, Israel. Before joining Project 39A in 2014, Maitreyi worked with Mr. Anand Grover, Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India and assisted him in his work as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health.
Maitreyi is a Visiting Academic to the Monash Faculty of Law and Eleos Justice between October and December 2023.
Daniel Pascoe
Daniel joined the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong in 2014 as an Assistant Professor, being promoted to Associate Professor in 2020.
Daniel’s research focuses on criminal law and punishment in comparative perspective, also extending to Southeast Asian law, Islamic Law, transitional justice and legal pedagogy. His research on the death penalty has appeared in various periodicals including the Asian Journal of Law and Society, The International Journal of Human Rights, The Australian Journal of Asian Law and the International and Comparative Law Quarterly.
Daniel's written submission and oral testimony contributed to the Australian Parliament's 2016 report 'A World Without the Death Penalty'. His first monograph, entitled: Last Chance for Life: Clemency in Southeast Asian Death Penalty Cases was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Daniel was a Visitng Scholar at Eleos Justice between March and August 2021.
Ambika Satkunanathan
Ambika Satkunanathan is an Open Society Fellow (2020-2022). From 2015 to 2020, she was a Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, where she conceptualised and led the first ever national study of prisons. Prior to that, for eight years, she functioned as the Legal Consultant to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Sri Lanka. Her research, advocacy and activism have focused on transitional justice, custodial violence, penal policy, militarization, gender and Tamil nationalism.
Her report on drug control, detention and rehabilitation in Sri Lanka, the first such study, was published in August 2021 by Harm Reduction International. Her publications include contributions to the Oxford Handbook of Gender & Conflict, the Routledge Handbook on Human Rights in South Asia, and Contemporary South Asia.
Ambika is a member of the Expert Panel of the Trial Watch Project of the Clooney Foundation and a member of the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. Ambika holds a Master of Laws (Human Rights) degree from the University of Nottingham, where she was a Chevening Scholar, and has earned bachelor’s degrees (LL.B / B.A) from Monash University, Australia.
Our Partner: Capital Punishment Justice Project
Elizabeth Wood
Elizabeth Wood is CPJP’s Chief Executive Officer. She joined CPJP in 2022, having worked for the Victorian Public Service for the past 10 years, most recently in alcohol and drug policy as part of the reforms delivering on the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. During her time in the public service, Elizabeth also worked on other social policy areas including housing, homelessness, family violence and prison oversight. Before this, Elizabeth worked for the United Nations Development Programme in Bangladesh and has experience in journalism and film-making.
Elizabeth has a Master of Laws (Juris Doctor) from Monash University, where she participated in the inaugural offering of the Anti-Death Penalty Clinic run by Eleos Justice and remained involved as a volunteer with Eleos Justice and CPJP since that time. She also has a Master of Global Media Communication (with a focus on international development) from the University of Melbourne. At RMIT University, she completed a Graduate Diploma in Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts (Media Studies), where she achieved first class honours for her thesis on human trafficking.
Elizabeth has an enduring commitment to human rights and social justice and is proud to be working towards the abolition of the death penalty with such dedicated partners and volunteers.
Stephen Keim SC
Stephen Keim is Chair of CPJP. Stephen is a barrister working out of chambers in Brisbane and Hobart. From his childhood growing up with nine siblings and parents who cared about the less fortunate, Stephen has always had an abomination for the death penalty and a love of progressive causes. Stephen is patron of two Brisbane anti-death penalty organisations, Australians Against Capital Punishment and the Julian Wagner Memorial Fund.
Julian McMahon
Julian McMahon AC SC is a barrister in Melbourne working in criminal law. He was President of Capital Punishment Justice Project from 2015 to 2020. He nows chairs the Council of Ambassadors to Capital Punishment Justice Project.
In 2002, Julian was briefed on the matter of Van Tuong Nguyen, a young Australian arrested in Singapore carrying heroin from Vietnam to Australia. Van was executed in 2005. Since that case, Julian has worked on death penalty cases and related issues. He has had death row clients in numerous countries, some executed, some not. He was part of the team who defended Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, executed in Indonesia on the 29th of April 2015.
In 2017, Julian was made a Companion of the Order of Australia. In 2016, he was awarded the Law Council of Australia’s President’s medal.