Rachel Owens is the Global Witness’ Head of the EU Office and Campaign Leader for its Global Corporate Accountability Campaign. This campaign aims to hold corporates to account for their role in the climate crisis and human rights abuses. She is also interim Campaign Leader of GW’s Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign which aims to tackle the role of business in increasing threats and killings of Land and Environmental Defenders.

In 2017, she set up Global Witness’ first EU office based in Brussels leading and working on campaigns to introduce EU rules for mandatory investor due diligence, to crackdown on corruption in EU golden visa schemes and to increase transparency of company ownership through the EU anti-money laundering rules. She was previously Campaign Leader of Global Witness’ campaign to tackle corruption in the oil, gas and mining sectors leading a campaign to bring in new beneficial ownership rules for all 52 countries that are part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Before joining Global Witness, she was Senior Political Advisor to Arlene McCarthy, former Vice-President of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs committee leading legislative work on financial services policy including reform of EU market abuse rules, capital markets reform and bankers bonuses.

Sandhya Ravishankar is an investigative journalist based in Chennai, India. She has covered illegal beach sand mining in Tamil Nadu extensively for over six years and has been subject to harassment, threats and has also battled court cases filed by the miners. Sandhya also won India's prestigious Ramnath Goenka award for this reportage in 2019. Sandhya has an abundant love for environmental journalism, especially of the investigative kind, and she believes it is crucial to find and expose the power structures that seek to destroy the environment for profit alone. Sandhya has adopted four Indian mongrels and adores dogs.

 @sandhyaravishan

Laurent is a French award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer, and founder of Forbidden Stories, a network of investigative journalists devoted to keeping stories alive. Richard has directed documentaries for 20 years.

Laurent Richard was a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 2017 at the University of Michigan and was named European Journalist of the year 2018 by the Prix Europa in Berlin.

As a filmmaker, Richard directed more than 20 long form stories for television and worked on many fields such as Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir. Laurent Richard has also investigated multiple corporate sectors such as “big tobacco”, pharmaceutical companies, financial institutions…

His documentary “My President Is on A Business Trip,” a 120-minute documentary on the topic, was awarded the best investigative report at FIGRA Festival in France.

Laurent Richard is the co-author of the book “Reporting Is Not a Crime. Stand Together Against Censorship,” a collective work of 15 journalists denouncing pressures against the press published in 2016.

 @laurentrichard0

Raphael Warolin has been a policy officer in the human rights division of the European External Action Service since 2018. He is in charge of several portfolios including human rights defenders’ protection, digital and human rights and freedom of religion or belief. He previously worked as international human rights observer for the human rights NGO Peace Brigades International in Mexico (which main mandate is to protect HRDs at risk) between 2015 and 2017. He also worked with Amnesty International European Institutions Office between 2013 and 2014. Raphael holds a degree in political sciences from Sciences Po Lille (France) and a master’s in European Studies from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.