NEWW's International Council includes 20 women's right scholars and advocates from 12 countries East and West. The Council is elected online once a year. Next election will be held in January 2008..

Director of International Programs, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University. Herresearch and teaching concentrates on women’s, political activism, grassroots mobilization, and the construction of women’s political spaces. Over the last fifteen years she has worked with many women’s and feminist groups in Central and East Europe and Central Asia on questions of political participation and women’s rights. She has also conducted extensive work on the impacts of political and economic restructuring on the process of democratization, citizens’ participation and decentralization in Central and East Europe. Her current multi-year project supported by the National Science Foundation and conducted jointly with colleagues from Poland and the Czech Republic, focuses on women’s situation in the process of the European Union enlargement.

Director of NEWW-Polska since January 2000. In the 1980s she was a member of the "Wolnosc i Pokój" (Freedom and Peace) movement. From 1989 to 1991 she was a coordinator of the Women's Section of Solidarity, and from 1991-1995 the President of Amnesty International Poland. She was the coordinator of the New York office of the Network of East-West Women between 1996 and 1997. On returning to Poland, she coordinated the Amnesty International project for founding the International Criminal Court from 1997 to 1999. Since 2003 she has been a member of the National Council of the Green Party "Zieloni 2004".

The Gender Programme Manager of UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina managing a few regional projects on gender mainstreaming in South East Europe. Ms Balta has skills in gender mainstreaming, gender responsive budgets, gender and development, local and regional economic development, adult education and gender and politics. She was the Stability Pact Gender Task Force NGO Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2000, nominated by the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ms Balta was crucial in establishing and developing strong intersectoral cooperation between the government and NGO sectors in a number of actions, most notably the implementation of the Gender Equality Law of Bosnia and Herzegovina

President of the Women’s Center for Democracy and Human Rights, Serbia & Montenegro. She is an international lawyer, journalist, researcher and lecturer on human rights and women’s rights. She has published articles and coordinated numerous projects in the fields of community development, human rights, women’s rights, and social justice. In the focus of her recent activities are women’s economic and social rights in the context of privatisation and globalisation, fostering policy change and sustainable development through gender equality. She participated as a speaker at the European Social Forum (2003) and World Social Forum (2004).
Affiliations: Women in Development Europe (WIDE), Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), Network East-West Women (NEWW), Women Waging Peace, Yugoslav International Law Association, Scientific Association Technology and Society.

Professor of Comparative Literature
Executive Director, Institute for Human Sciences, Boston University.
Her books include The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination, which has had several editions in four languages.

Student at Central European University in Budapest, Before she was the Senior Program Officer for Europe and the CIS at the Global Fund for Women,

Kyrgystan, journalists and the researcher, she is one of the well known women's activist in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia. Currently she is Chair of Sociology Department at American University in Central Asia and Director of women's NGO "Agency for Social Technologies".

Vice President of Administration and Finance at Transatlantic Partners Against AIDS

Executive President of Equal Opportunities for Women Foundation, Romania

Professor of Law
Isabel Marcus is a professor of law at the University at Buffalo Law School. She is also one of the founders and current Director of the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender at the University. She served as chair of the Department of Women's Studies at the College of Arts and Sciences from 1997 - 2002. She is on the board of directors of the Network of East-West Women, an international non-governmental organization.

FEMINA, Russia

attorney, Hogan & Hartson, Moscow, Russia. Kimberly Reed has 16 years of experience in corporate transactions and litigation, including six years as an assistant dean and professor of law at a “Top 20” American law school. Her practice centers on complex international corporate transactions, mergers and acquisitions, private equity investments, project finance/infrastructure transactions, and international litigation.

Georgia, member of State Commission of Gender Equality, Coalition of Women's NGO of Georgia - "Institutional Machinery" and "Women's and Peace Building" groups. Member of the coordinating committee of the regional network "Women for Peace", coordinator of Women's Information Center which was founded in March 2000 by an initiative group of young women with the support of the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly - Georgian National Committee (hCa-GNC). In 2000 the Women's Information Center co-founded the Georgian Women's NGOs Coalition and joined the international organization "Women Against Violence Europe" (WAVE). In March 2003 WIC was officially registered and became an independent organization.

Lenka Simerska is a Regional Co-Coordinator of Gender Evaluation Methodology Project for Central and Eastern Europe.

Active feminist activist since l969. Founder and member of the New York Radical Feminists. She was co-editor of Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, a central text in U.S. debates about the historicity of sexual experience, and of The Feminist Memoir Project. A professor of gender studies and literature at The New School for Social Research, she has written germinal articles about feminism. A founder of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, of the action group No More Nice Girls and of the Network of East-West Women (NEWW), her most recent writing and political work is about the changing situation of women in Eastern Europe.

Genoveva Tisheva- Managing Director of the Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation/ BGRF/. A lawyer with experience in the field of civil law, human rights law and women’ s rights, in advocacy and drafting legislation on gender equality. Genoveva coordinated numerous research projects and monitoring reports on women’ s rights and socio-economic rights as well as legal aid programmes for disadvantaged groups of women. She is Director of the Women’s Human Rights Training Institute / WHRTI/ - a NEWW/ BGRF initiative implemented in cooperation with the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Genoveva is member of the Network of Legal Experts on Gender Equality to the European Commission; member of the Coordinating Committee of the international coalition Social Watch.

Mrs. Susanna Vardanyan is the President of Women’s Rights Center NGO. By education she is an obstetrician-gynecologist. She has been working for a long time in the State University Center of Family Planning and Sexual Health. After the collapse of the Soviet Union she got actively involved in women's movement, once the chance for that appeared. Mrs. Vardanyan became one of the pioneers of women's movement in Armenia. The first step was the establishment of Women's Club in 1987, which in 1990 became Women's Association "Hayouhi", the mission of which was to raise women's role in the society. In 1997 "Hayouhi" was renamed into Women's Rights Center.
Since 1997 the organization led by Mrs. Vardanyan implemented a great number of projects addressing women's issues, particularly in the field of prevention of violence against women, including domestic violence. Women’s Rights Center opened the first Emergency Shelter in Armenia for women-victims of domestic violence and their children. At present WRC, lead by Mrs.Vardanyan, beside other activities, is working on draft of Domestic Violence Law in Armenia.
In 2002 June Mrs. Susanna Vardanyan was awarded with a Human Rights Award by Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights organization for the commitment to human rights and in recognition of her outstanding work in the sphere of promoting women's human rights in Armenia.

Anne Zill is is the Director of the Art Gallery at the University of New England on the Westbrook College Campus, and has curated two exhibitions at the United Nations for UNIFEM & the International Museum of Women in 2000 & 2001(www.imow.org). She is also the Founder and Director of the Women’s Center for Ethics in Action in Alliance with Men at UNE, an organization created to advance women’s leadership from a spiritual and values perspective in front of politics-as-usual, focusing on U.S. role around the world. She has been a foundation program associate with the Stewart Mott Charitable Trust for more than 25 years focusing upon women and reproductive health, peace, human rights, international relations & military reform, honest government, civil rights/civil liberties. Earlier she was the news director and producer with National Educational Radio (NPR’s predecessor). She has published articles in The Washington Post, Barnard College Alumnae Magazine, Washingtonian, and The Maine Times, among other publications. She is a graduate of Barnard College with a Master’s Degree in broadcast journalism from American University where her mentor was Edward Bliss, Edward R. Murrow’s longtime CBS editor. Honorary

National Council for Research on Women. Dr. Chamberlain is an economist by training who has had multiple careers as an academic, government official and foundation program officer and resident scholar. She served as a Program Officer in Education and Public Policy at the Ford Foundation beginning in 1967. In that capacity, she was instrumental in developing the field of women’s studies. While at the Russell Sage Foundation in 1982, she headed a Task Force Study on Women in Higher Education where she helped found that National Council for Research on Women. Ms. Chamberlain is on the board of the Feminist Press, the Women's Interarts Center, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the Network of East-West Women.