Aram Aqil is a Kurdish-Syrian human rights defender and expert on minority rights from Rojava/West Kurdistan. He currently runs an educational NGO in Germany and serves as a member of the Council for Participation and Diversity in the state of Bremen. Aram’s commitment to human rights is deeply personal. In 2014, he was held hostage by ISIS for 280 days while working as a video journalist. This experience inspired him to write a best-selling book, published in German and Dutch in 2017. Over the past ten years, Aram has coordinated and led numerous civil society projects focusing on diversity, extremism prevention, and minority rights advocacy. Aram has represented Kurdish civil society in diplomatic forums, including UN seminars in Geneva, meetings with EU parliamentarians in Brussels, and the GERIS project delegation to the United States. He is also a member of the WeAreMENA Network. He serves as a lecturer at the Volkshochschule (VHS) education center in Germany.