Alex Arriaga is currently an Independent consultant and is the Co-Chair of the CEDAW Working Group.  Prior to that she served as the Director of Government Relations for Amnesty International USA.  In this capacity Alex was a chief liaison representing Amnesty International’s human rights concerns to U.S. and foreign government officials.  Prior to that Alex worked with the Inter-American Dialogue, a non-profit organization that focuses on policy toward Latin America. There she served as a Senior Fellow and Director of Legislative Affairs.  Her focus was on the promotion of human rights, good governance, and labor rights in the context of trade negotiations in the Western Hemisphere.

Alex served as Special Assistant to President William J. Clinton and as Chief of Staff to the Special Envoy for the Americas at the White House from 1999 through January 2001. In that role, Alex coordinated and advised on policy related to the Americas.  In 1995 Alex was appointed as Special Coordinator for External Affairs and later as Senior Advisor for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the Department of State. She served as Executive Director of Secretary Albright's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, U.S. Delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and Chair of the Bureau’s Working Group on Women's Human Rights.

From 1987 to 1995, Alex was the Director of the bipartisan, 220-member Congressional Human Rights Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Caucus focused congressional attention on human rights in over 100 countries and worked to address issues such as genocide, torture, arbitrary arrests, trafficking in women and children, indigenous rights, treatment of minorities, and the plight of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Alex is recipient of several awards, including the United Nations Association's Human Rights Community Award; the Aurora Foundation's Ginetta Sagan Human Rights Stipend; the Minority Business & Professionals Network Award for Outstanding Leadership, Service and Achievement; and the U.S. Department of State's Superior Honor Award.

June Zeitlin is currently serving as the Director of the CEDAW Education Project at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Education Fund.  Most recently, June served as the Executive Director for the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) from 1999 to 2008. She has extensive experience as a women’s rights lawyer, social policy advocate and in intergovernmental relations.

She worked at the Ford Foundation for over a decade as the Director of the Governance and Civil Society Program, Director of the Gender and Institutional Change Project, Deputy Director of the Rights and Social Justice Program and Program Officer for Women’s Rights.  Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, June worked for New York City’s Office of Management and Budget and the Human Resources Administration in intergovernmental relations.

She also spent time working in Washington, DC first as a legislative assistant for former Congresswoman and WEDO co-founder Bella Abzug.  She then held positions in the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare serving as the director of the newly created Office on Domestic Violence and prior to that as a Special Assistant to the General Counsel of the Department. 

She also worked as a lawyer with the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, DC and earlier in her career with Bedford-Stuyvesant Legal Services in Brooklyn, New York. She has a JD from New York University School of Law and a BA from the University of Rochester.