Guardians of Humanity – The Podcast to Restore your Faith in Humanity

David Yambio is only 26 years old, but his biography reads like that of a man two times his age. Born in Sudan during the second civil war, his family forced to flee to Congo and later to the Central African Republic, where they had no access to education nor resources. He returned to South Sudan when he was 7, then at the age of 12 he was abducted by the LRA, the army led by Joseph Kony. He fought as a child soldier for over a year, then escaped only to find himself forcibly conscripted by the Sudanese government at the age of 16. He became a refugee at 17, crossed half of Africa to find himself in Libya, where he was tortured, exploited, forced to labor, to arbitrary detentions, kidnappings and he was sold to militias to fight in the Libyan civil war. After 4 failed attempts to reach Europe, he started working with Libyan organisations and international ngo’s to fight for the rights of refugees. He started radio programs, co-founded the organisation "Refugees in Libya,", then he spent months on the run for the Libyan secret service. He then did a fifth and finally successful attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea. David now lives in Italy where he launches campaign after campaign to raise awareness and pursues legal action for the cause of refugees in Libya and people on the move in the North African region.

Hans Claus is a jack-of-all-trades. Not only is he a painter, a sculptor, a photographer and a writer-performer, but for 38 years he was also the director of the prison the city of Oudenaarde in Belgium. He retired three months ago. If you want to know what is wrong with the current detention system in our society, about the political struggles involved in creating human conditions in our houses of detention, then not only should you listen to his interviews or read his scientific writings, but you should also get to know his sculptures and his paintings, for they speak about the human condition in its broadest sense. About opening the gates of our narrowed minds and about the self-inflicted detention that so many humans call ‘my freedom’. For him, art is no therapy, but an absolute and inevitable necessity in his life. He is the author of the Declaration of 30 November, a plea for necessary reforms to create a society where people LIVE TOGETHER, freed from the greed for money, and where they can appreciate one another and the nature they live in.

Judit Kiss is an economist and political commentator on Eastern Europe. She is Hungarian by birth and lives in Geneva. In 2006, she published ‘Apám halálának nyara’ (translated into English as 'The Summer My Father Died'). This book covers about seventy years of turbulent Hungarian history. Lyrical, poetic and pierced with black humour, ‘The Summer My Father Died’ is a stunning and achingly beautiful memoir in which Judit uncovers het father's struggle as a communist who denied his Jewish roots, and how Judit herself deals with the implications of that choice. She is also the author of 'More nights than days', a survey of writings of child genocide survivors, and of the study 'Arms Industry Transformation and Integration: The Choices of East Central Europe'.

Author of the award-winning graphic novel Guantánamo Kid Since 2018, Jérôme Tubiana has been working as an operational adviser and advocacy manager with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), focusing on refugee and migration issues. This included advocating for Out of Libya’s initiative aiming at opening safe and legal pathways for migrants and refugees stranded in Libya, and systematically victims of abuses, which the United Nations have qualified as “crimes against humanity”. Prior to this, Jérôme worked as a researcher specializing in conflicts and migration across the Sahara and Horn of Africa, in particular in Sudan, including for MSF and other humanitarian NGOs, human rights organizations, the International Crisis Group, the Clingendael Institute and other think tanks, as well as the UN Security Council Panel of Experts on the Sudan and the African Union–United Nations Joint Mediation Support Team on Darfur. In addition to various reports, he is the author of several books including Chroniques du Darfour (on the war in Darfur, Glénat, 2010) and the award-winning graphic novel Guantánamo Kid (the true story of Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, SelfMadeHero/Abrams, 2019). His articles have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, The Baffler, Le Monde diplomatique and XXI.

Here's a musician who defied the Belgian state and denounced the legal absurdities of the Covid-19 restrictions. In 2021, Quentin Dujardin was refused the right to organize a guitar concert in a church, even though the maximum number of participants was respected and all distancing and other measures were taken. Risking a penalty of 12000 EUR, he decided to give the concert anyway.