Year: 2023

Mr. Liu assumed the responsibility as Taiwan Representative to Hungary in September 2020 after being appointed by President Tsai Ing-wen. Mr. Liu was the Vice Chairman of Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) before taking up the new assignment to Budapest. Mr. Liu held numerous positions in institutions such as the Cross-strait Prospect Foundation, the Taiwan Asia Exchange Foundation, as well as an advisor to the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and the Strait Exchange Foundation (SEF) in Taiwan.

Mr. Liu also worked at the Tainan City Government in January 2015 as Deputy Secretary-general to Mayor Lai Chin-te, who now is Taiwan’s Vice President. His past working experiences also include: President and CEO of the Taipei-based think tank the Taiwan Brain Trust, the director of International Affairs Department of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). From September 2008 to December 2009, Mr. Liu was a visiting fellow at the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies of the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Mr. Liu spent eight years in the DPP government as a senior foreign policy adviser to former President Chen Shui-bian in the Presidential Office from 2000 to 2006 and then joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the Vice Chairman of Research and Planning Committee from 2006 to 2008.

Mr. Liu published a book entitled “History Entangled: Strategic Convergence and Divergence of U.S.-Taiwan Relation (2000-2008)” and co-authored a book entitled “Democratic Consolidation: National Security Challenges to the Transitions”.

Mr. Liu has been a frequent editorial contributor and political columnist for the Taipei Times, the Taiwan News and other media in the past decades. His research covers the fields of Taiwan’s domestic politics and foreign policy, cross-strait relations, US-Taiwan relations and Asian security, politics and economics, Taiwan’s economic and trade strategy and Taiwan-EU relations.

Mr. Liu earned his M.A. from the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.

László Bruszt is Director of the CEU Democracy Institute, and Professor of Sociology at the Central European University. During the regime change in 1989 he served as National Secretary of the newly formed independent trade unions and has represented them in the Roundtable Negotiations. He started to teach at CEU in 1992 and has served as its Acting Rector and President in 1996/97. Between 2004 and 2016 he was teaching at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His publications focus on issues of regime change and economic transformation. His more recent studies deal with the politics of economic integration of the Eastern and Southern peripheries of Europe.

Karolina Zbytniewska is the Editor in Chief at Euractiv.pl.

She is an analyst and public expert in European and international affairs. European Marie Curie PhD fellow in political science. Dedicated journalist and editor. Public speaker, conference chair and moderator. Actively committed to political and social, and how they intermingle, i.e. in/equality, migration & refugees, climate change… populism/illiberalism/new traditionalism. All these in the European and global context. Aiming at spreading reliable knowledge enriched with diverse human contexts. 9 years as the Chief Editor at EURACTIV.pl news media.

Stéphane Bourgeois is the Leader of Collaborative Low Energy Vision for the European Region and European Relations and Policy Manager at NégaWatt Association.

Stephane Bourgeois has been working on climate and energy policy for 15 years. After advising Fiona Hall in the European Parliament on major energy efficiency and renewable energy dossiers, Stephane headed the regulatory affairs of the European Wind Energy Association (now Windpower Europe) in Brussels, and then advised the Moroccan Government on its energy strategy on behalf of the German Cooperation Agency GIZ. For the past 3 years he has been responsible for négaWatt’s European relations and policies, a leading French energy and climate Think tank which has been coordinating the consortium work on a Collaborative Low Energy Vision for the European Region scenario. The CLEVER bottom-up low energy scenario explores the EU’s sufficiency and efficiency potential and will be launched in June in Brussels.

William Browder is the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, the Head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and author of Red Notice.

William Browder was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when he was denied entry to the country and declared “a threat to national security” for exposing corruption in Russian state-owned companies.

In 2008, Mr. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a massive fraud committed by Russian government officials that involved the theft of US $230 million of state taxes. Sergei testified against state officials involved in this fraud and was subsequently arrested, imprisoned without trial and systematically tortured. He spent a year in prison under horrific detention conditions, was repeatedly denied medical treatment, and died in prison on November 16, 2009, leaving behind a wife and two children.

Since then, Mr. Browder has sought justice outside of Russia and started a global campaign for governments around the world to impose targeted visa bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers and highly corrupt officials. The United States was the first to impose these targeted sanctions with the passage of the Sergei Magnitsky Accountability Act in 2012, followed by the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act in 2016.

Since then, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Baltic states, the European Union and most recently Australia have passed their own versions of the Magnitsky Act. Mr. Browder is currently working to have similar legislation passed in other countries worldwide including New Zealand and Japan, to name a few.

Una Hajdari is an award-winning journalist with over a decade of experience covering nationalism, authoritarianism and post-communist societies in Europe, with a particular focus on issues of identity. She reports on the Western Balkans for Politico Europe.

Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is the Head of the Political Science PhD Programme at Riga Stradins University, she is the Director at RSU China Studies Centre.

Dr Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is a political scientist, China scholar, Head of Political Science PhD programme and China Studies Centre at Riga Stradins University, Head of Asia programme at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, a member of CHERN and European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC). After having defended her doctoral dissertation on Chinese political discourse in the Hu Jintao period, she has held a Senior visiting research scholar position at Fudan University School of Philosophy, Shanghai, a Fulbright visiting scholar position at the Stanford University Center for East Asia Studies, and a MERICS European China Policy fellowship.

Her research interests are Chinese political discourse EU-China relations Russia-China relations China in the Baltics.

Tomislav Tomašević was born in the Croatian capital of Zagreb in 1982. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Political Science in 2010 and obtained his Master’s in the field of Environment, Society, and Development from the University of Cambridge in 2013.

Tomašević’s interest in politics was apparent from a young age when he joined the Green Action at 16. Moreover, he was the organisation’s President from 2007 to 2012. During these years, he was also the president of the Croatian Youth Network and a member of the Youth Council.

He participated in the launch of Right to the City in 2006 and was a member of the Sustainable Development and Environmental Protection Council of the Government of the Republic of Croatia from 2012 to 2015. In 2017, Tomašević became a member of the newly founded “Zagreb is Ours!” party. He was elected Mayor of the City of Zagreb on 30 May 2021.

Tomáš Kopečný is the Governmental Envoy for the Reconstruction of Ukraine in Czech Republic.

Since January 2023, Tomáš Kopečný has been the Governmental Envoy for the Reconstruction of Ukraine. In the years 2020 to 2022, he was the Deputy Minister of Defense for the management of industrial cooperation of the Ministry of Defense of the Czech Republic. In the past, he held the position of director of the department of industrial cooperation, head of the department of international defense-industrial cooperation or adviser in the office of the deputy minister of defense at the ministry.

Taube Van Melkebeke is a Policy Manager at the Green European Foundation.

Ms Van Melkebeke was previously a Policy Advisor on EU Politics and Climate Governance at E3G. She was Attaché at the Permanent Representation of Belgium to the EU between 2019 and 2022. She also worked at Vlaamse Overheid as a Policy Officer for 3 years.