Experts on countries of origin by country

My expertise encompasses humanitarian affairs, public policy, migration, education, community resilience, religious and ethnic diversity, civil society development, international cooperation, and stakeholder engagement, with extensive knowledge of the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics shaping emerging and developing regions. Through research, policy analysis, and community-focused initiatives, I have contrubted to advancing sustainable development, social inclusion, intercultural dialogue, institutional capacity building, and regional cooperation, while leading forthcoming research on governance reform, development partnerships, educational transformation, migration trends, and socioeconomic development.

Georgian lawyer and ACCORD-certified Country of Origin Information researcher. Served as UNHCR COI Researcher for the Tbilisi City Court and Tbilisi Court of Appeals (2018 to 2020) and as COI consultant to the Common Courts of Georgia (2020 to 2025), and trains judges and legal aid lawyers on COI research and refugee law. Covers political opinion and opposition activity, ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ claims, gender-based and domestic violence, human trafficking, military service evasion and conscientious objection, and displacement from Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh, across the South Caucasus, Central Asia and the wider post-Soviet region. Works in Georgian, Russian, English and German.

Barrister and academic, with extensive research, publishing and advisory experience in former Soviet Union and other countries, fluent in Russian

Dr. Patrick Christian is a psychoanalytic anthropologist with a doctorate in the psychopathology of ethnic and cultural violence. He has spent the past 36 years conducting field research in Eurasia, Southwest Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Horn of Africa, the Central Sahel, the Andean Mountains, the Amazon Basin, and Mesoamerica, as part of military, diplomatic, and humanitarian interventions in violent intra-state conflicts. With the exceptions of India, Iran and Russia, Dr Christian has personally lived in and/or worked in each country he specialises in.

Dr. Christian is a member of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Psychological Anthropology and the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, Race, Conflict, and Violence.

Dr Christian’s work applies anthropology, psychology, and sociology to curate scientific understanding of specific subject communities’ lived-experiences – mentally and emotionally. His reporting illuminates the underlying psychosocial-emotional motivations behind individual and collective behaviour, both post-mortem and predictive of violent conflict.

Dr Christian’s field research focuses on civil-conflict… Read more

Associate Professor at King’s College London with over two decades of internationally recognised expertise on crime, corruption, policing, prisons and criminal justice reform across the former Soviet Union. Known for combining rigorous academic research with high-level policy advisory roles for international organisations as well as UK and US government departments.

I am available to produce general country expert evidence reports on political, social, and economic conditions, corruption and crime environments, state protection capacity, and risks faced by specific social groups in my countries of expertise. I also provide expert reports and testimony for cases involving risks from political activism, exposure of corruption or organised crime, trafficking and exploitation, state collusion with criminal groups, police corruption, and inhumane detention conditions in former Soviet Union countries.

I have extensively travelled and conducted field research across former Soviet Union countries, gaining a deep understanding of how informal networks, weak rule of law, and criminal-state nexus structures create specific vulnerabilities for asylum claimants. My research has been published in leading academic journals and briefed to senior policymakers and officials… Read more

Marilisa Lorusso is a regular contributor to Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa, an Italian think tank and online magazine with approximately 5,000 daily views.

She has been deployed by the Italian Foreign Ministry as an expert for post-war civilian monitoring missions in Georgia. Additionally, she has served in a non-diplomatic capacity at the Geneva International Discussions on the Georgian peace settlement while based at the European Union Council in Brussels.

Emir Onur Romano Cilek is a human-rights practitioner and country-conditions specialist on Turkey, with fifteen years documenting and contesting the persecution of non-believers, apostates (ex-Muslims), converts, secular activists, and LGBTQ+ people. He founded and leads Ateizm Derneği — the first legally recognised atheist organisation in a Muslim-majority country — and in March 2026 delivered an oral statement at the 61st Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, on behalf of Humanists International and Ateizm Derneği, addressing Turkey's Penal Code Article 216(3). Through the Atheist Refugee Assistance Program, the Atheist Support Network, and the Secular Rescue Program, he has assessed and documented many hundreds of protection cases originating from Turkey and the surrounding region, including evidentiary documentation relied on in UNHCR and immigration proceedings. His expertise covers the legal framework criminalising religious dissent (Penal Code Articles 216 and 301), state and societal treatment of the non-religious and apostates, family- and community-based ("honour") risk, surveillance and prosecution of activists, and the situation of LGBTQ+ individuals and women at risk.

As a prison conditions and detention expert, Vicki Prais has comprehensive, expert level legal and practical knowledge of international and regional human rights standards on criminal justice and detention. Vicki has in-country experience working in different settings, including Kosovo, Armenia, Albania, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Japan, Georgia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Canada, Spain and Russia and a very strong understanding of penal related issues through practical visits to closed institutions in various countries (Canada, Georgia, Japan, Spain, Turkey and England & Wales). 

Vicki Prais is an internationally recognised award-winning human rights lawyer, independent human rights consultant, academic, trainer and career coach with expertise in the protection of prisoners’ rights, prison reform, humane detention and the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment in detention. She brings 29 years of professional experience in International Organisations (the UN, Council of Europe), the British Government (Human Rights Advisor to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Government Legal Department), civil society (Amnesty International, Penal Reform International), national human rights institutions (the Scottish Human Rights Commission) and academia (Visiting… Read more

Noah Tucker is senior research consultant for the Oxus Society, an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and held the Handa Studentship at the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) from 2021-2024.  He was previously Executive Editor for the Not in Our Name film and television series, the first region-wide project designed to prevent violent extremism in Central Asia through community dialogues in areas most directly affected by recruiting to Syria. Noah has worked as a consultant to programs supporting and evaluating programs for returnees from the Syrian conflict in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for the US State Department and USIP. He has worked broadly on collaborative projects for government, academic and international organizations to identify the way social and religious groups affect political and security outcomes in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Recent publications include “Uzbek Women in the Syrian Conflict: First-Person Narratives and Gendered Perspectives on Mobilization and De-Mobilization.” Noah has worked on Central Asian issues since 2002—specializing in religion, national identity, ethnic conflict and social… Read more