The CCAN Core Committee elects up to three co-chairs to serve a term of one year. At least one co-chair should represent a civil society organization from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Co-chairs schedule and facilitate meetings, ensure regular communication with government and company representatives, and ensure that both the Core Committee and the Consultation Network represent a diversity of views and backgrounds.
The current co-chairs for 2023 are:
Farzaneh Badii
Dr. Farzaneh Badii (she/her pronouns) is the founder of Digital Medusa, an initiative based in New York that focuses on protecting the core values of our global digital space with sound governance. For the past decade, Dr Badiei has directed and led projects about Internet and social media governance.
She has undertaken research at Yale Law School, Georgia Institute of Technology and the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. Her focus is on governance issues related to Internet infrastructure and social media platforms. Dr. Badii received her PhD in law from the University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics. Her dissertation focused on online private justice systems, institutional design, and online market intermediaries. Between 2011 and 2014, Dr. Badiei worked at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum Secretariat.
Katy Vaughan
Dr Katy Vaughan (she/her pronouns) is a Lecturer in Law at Swansea University in Wales researching and teaching in the areas of counterterrorism law and policy and the impact of this on the protection and promotion of human rights.
Katy is a member of the Cyber Threats Research Centre, an interdisciplinary centre with members with expertise in law, criminology, political science, and psychology exploring a range of online threats from terrorism, extremism and cybercrime, to child sexual exploitation and cybercrime. She is also a member of VOX-Pol which is an academic research network focused on researching impacts of violent online political extremism and responses to it.
She is also currently a member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism Legal Frameworks Working Group.
Abdur Razzaq
Abdur Razzaq (he/him pronouns) is the Chairperson of the Royal Commission Follow-up of FIANZ (the umbrella Muslim organisation of Aotearoa New Zealand) and leads the national response to the 15 March terror attack. His advocacy focuses on ensuring that the lessons learned after this tragedy are applied effectively to prevent similar events from occurring in the future.
An educationalist by profession, he was the founding CEO of Education New Zealand (formerly NZEIL), a government-owned organisation. He is currently the Executive Chairperson of New Zealand’s oldest private sector developmental and technology transfer organisation, implementing World Bank & Asian Development Bank projects globally in over 40 countries. He also chairs the New Zealand Halal Industry Forum, which is comprised of government ministries and meat and dairy export sectors, among others.
