CNS Convening Council
Below are the current Convening Council members serving the Congress of Nations and States.
Dr. Emmanuel Enekwechi
Convening Council Chair
Dr. Emmanuel Enekwechi was born and grew up in the Igbo Nation in Nigeria. He got his Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology at Rutgers University in the United States of America. He taught both graduate and undergraduate students and practiced as a Clinical Psychologist in several universities in both Nigeria and the United States for forty years before retiring. He was the first head of the Biafra Government in exile. He is currently the Chair of the Convening Council of the Congress of Nations and States.
Maira Aisaeva
Convening Council Member
Maira is a Uyghur -born out of East Turkestan, based in London. She is an activist. She works in local government and is an expert in Housing Law. She is President of the UK Uyghur Community (UKUC) and a Chair of the UKUC Charity.
Dr. Xoua Thao
Convening Council Member
Dr. Xoua Thao was born in Laos, and when the Secret War ended in his homeland in 1976, he immigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen years old. He and his family resettled in Providence, Rhode Island as Hmong refugees from the camps of Thailand. After graduating from high school in 1980, Dr. Thao attended Brown University and received his bachelor’s degree in 1984. In May 1989, Dr. Thao graduated with a combined Medical Degree (M.D.) from the Alpert Medical School at Brown University and a master’s degree of Public Health (M.P.H.) from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. In 1997, Dr. Thao also received his Juris Doctor Degree (J.D.) from the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul and later became a member of the MN Bar. A practicing family physician over two decades, Dr. Thao has tirelessly worked to promote the health need and well-being of the underserved, the vulnerable, and immigrant communities. He has sat on the boards of various local non-profit organizations and has contributed time and resource to the establishment of the Hmong Bar Association of Minnesota, Hmong Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, Hmong Golf Association, Hmong Nationalities Organization, and recently the founding of the Hmong American Medical Association.
Dr. Habib Ullah
Convening Council Member
Dr. Habib Ullah was born in an Rohingya family. He has earned a PhD in Electrical, Electronics and System Engineering from University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) in 2014. He has authored and co-authored more than 60 International peer-reviewed journal articles and presented research work in 9 international conferences in Australia, Mauritius, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh and published 8 book chapters. He is an Executive Committee member of Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO).
Princess Cecilia Ndifon
Convening Council Member
Princess Ndifon Cecilia served as a Police Inspector (Crime Investigator) in the Cameroon Police Force from 1984 to 2000; when she anticipated retirement after an in-depth research into the plight of her Community. After discovering documents, maps and confidential correspondences revealing how disruptive colonial forces were unleashed to burn and destroy her Moko-oh community and chased away the populations between 1889 and 1914; she resigned, raised awareness, educated and mobilized her community members in 1999, to organize into the Association for the Reconstruction and Development of the Moko-oh People Cameroon (AFTRADEMOP). Since 1999, through AFTRADEMOP’s legal framework and on a voluntary basis, Princess Ndifon began advocating for the Recognition and the Restoration of the Moko-oh People’s land rights and their resettlement in their ancestral villages. After exhausting internal remedies to no avail, she proceeded to the regional level and filed a Communication against the State of Cameroon at the African Union’s Commission on Human and People’s Rights in 2007; where AFTRADEMOP had been granted Observer’s status in 2005; to observe human rights in Africa and to report back to the Commission. She later proceeded to the international level and filed statements at the United Nations instances on indigenous issues in 2008. After training in Italy in 2004; at the UN in Geneva 2006; Ghana 2007 in international humans rights legal standards; frustrated with unscrupulous legal counsels and judges reminding Princess Ndifon of how she is ignorant of the law, she took the bull by the horns and returned to the benches in the university to read law in 2009. In March 2016, she defended a thesis on the theme“ Indigenous Legal Systems and the Protection of Indigenous Peoples’ rights “The Case of the Moghamo Customary Court”: in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of a Professional Masters Degree in International Human Rights Law, International Criminal Law and International Humanitarian Law. Therefore, she had to combine advocacy, prosecuting the state of Cameroon and bookwork to become an expert/consultant in Indigenous Issues. Princess Ndifon was seeking for Reparations for colonial atrocities in favor of her Moko-oh Community; when she was directed to the Congress of Nations and States (CNS).
Owen Lloyd
Convening Council Member
Owen Lloyd is from the Hapu (tribe) of Nga Ariki Kaiputahi, Gisborne Region, New Zealand. He is a Cultural Advisor, Husband father Grandad And Great Grandad. Passionate about justice for indigenous people especially those who have been colonized by a western people and now live in poverty landless in their own country.
Mohamed Aboelazm
Convening Council Member
Aboelazm has worked as a lawyer specializing in constitutional law and human rights, and now provides expert advice on human rights and justice policies. Aboelazm has dedicated his career to supporting and advocating for human rights and the representation of victims. He has led numerous projects and provided key guidance to many human rights organizations, initiatives, and campaigns. With a deep understanding of the legal and socio-political dynamics in the MENA region, he is highly respected in the field. In his role, Aboelazm has worked on documenting and fact-finding about crimes and human rights violations from the perspective of transitional justice. He has also participated in tracking the perpetrators of human rights violations and working to prevent their impunity. In addition, Aboelazm has participated in the development of documentation practices and methodologies, protocols for managing, processing, analyzing, and archiving information, and documents of human rights violations. Aboelazm has written and contributed in particular to reports on justice, torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, abuses in prisons and detention facilities, emergencies, terrorism and extremism, rule of law, the death penalty, international human rights law, the rights of minorities and indigenous people. Mohamed Aboelazm is with a Master of Law degree, In addition obtained postgraduate degrees in civil society and human rights, NGO management, and project evaluation from Cairo University in Egypt.
Y Bhim Nie
Convening Council Member
Y Bhim Nie was born into the Rhade tribe in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. He is a United States Citizen and has first-hand experience living before, during, and after the USA participation in the Vietnam War. He lived for more than fifteen years under the communist Vietnam regime. He trained as a medical doctor and fled to the USA where today he lives in North Carolina. Y Bhim Nie and his wife are the proud parents of two grown children and the grandparents of one granddaughter. During his lifetime, he has survived bombing, fighting, betrayal, torture, and incarceration. He has experienced the killing of family members and having his home village completely wiped off the map by the invasion of Vietnamese colonialist settlers, thus destroying a way of life that took thousands of years to create and form. In addition to losing our traditional clan lands, they destroyed our history, culture, identity, and language. Our children no longer speak our Rhade language, and our people have become enslaved, forced into abject poverty, and turned into exotic museum objects by the Vietnamese oppressors. His people’s very right to exist is denied. He has no terms to describe this phenomenon, but he is am proud to make, “Genocide” word, born and as a part of the Dega people’s vocabulary. Dega genocide is, simply, the elimination of the Dega people. It is the combination of physical and cultural destruction. The dispossession of their ancestral clan land, and the abolishment of their existence, histories, culture, identity, and of their languages. It is psychological, biological, moral, economic, and environmental destruction. Dega genocide means the intentional destruction of all aspects of the very existence of the Dega as a people.