Experts on countries of origin by country

An experienced lawyer with in-depth expertise in the legal system of Bangladesh and the United Kingdom, specialising in ethnic groups, human rights, and immigration law.

With a robust foundation in international relations, law, and political science, I am a distinguished expert witness specializing in Balkan affairs. My career is characterized by a deep commitment to understanding the intricate geopolitical dynamics and legal frameworks that shape this vibrant region. My academic pursuits culminated in a prestigious certification in Law from the University of Oxford, where I honed my expertise in international law, human rights, and cross-border legal issues. Professionally, I have collaborated with NATO on defense and international policy initiatives, providing valuable insights into Balkan geopolitics. My participation in European Union election conferences has allowed me to engage in high-level discussions on the political shifts affecting the region. Additionally, my roles as a Leasing Administrator and Legal Advisor have equipped me with practical experience in legal documentation and corporate governance. Driven by a passion for advancing understanding in the complex political landscape of the Balkans, I leverage my extensive education and practical experience to provide expert testimony and consultancy in this dynamic field.

Lecturer in African Studies at the University of Edinburgh with extensive experience researching and writing about violent social groups and discrimination in selected African countries.  

I am a UCL social science researcher in the field of Applied and Socio-linguistics, focusing on how experiences and claims of people seeking asylum in the UK and Europe as stateless people of Kuwait (i.e., Bidoon Kuwaitis) are communicated and disputed. My research is (in)formed by my training in refugee and forced migration studies at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre and my lived experiences as a Bidoon Kuwaiti person going through the UK asylum system and eventually being recognised as a refugee following a successful appeal in which I was found to be a witness of truth.

Frederica Jansz is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in the UK. She is a journalist and writer who specializes on political, gender violence, and social justice issues. She was formerly the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Sunday Leader’ newspaper in Sri Lanka and has over two decades of experience as a war correspondent, an investigative journalist, and frequent commentator on human rights abuses and war crimes. She covered Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict for two decades often reporting from the battle front. She has actively participated in journalist safety training and skills building exercises in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan. She was also a television host and anchor on weekly shows that focused on news, current affairs and social justice issues during her two-decade long career as a journalist in Sri Lanka. She continues to be seen as an authority on press freedoms in South Asia, speaking at global venues and being interviewed for television audiences.

The Expert is an analyst and researcher based in Istanbul since 1989. His special areas of interest are leftist, Kurdish and Islamist movements and organizations, religious and ethnic minorities, rightist organizations, political Islam, human rights, security issues and civil-military relations.

Michelle Johnson is Associate Dean of Faculty for the Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University. A cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and ritual in Africa and the contemporary African diaspora (i.e., Africans in Europe and the United States), she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau and with Guinean immigrants in Portugal. She has held grants from the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion in Africa, African Studies Review, Anthropology Quarterly, and Food and Foodways. She is author of Re-making Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon - Mecca - Bissau (Indiana University Press, 2020) and co-author (with Edmund "Ned" Searles) of Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters (Lexington Books, 2021). She also provides expert testimony on asylum cases pertaining to West Africa and the contemporary African diaspora on topics such as genital cutting, forced marriage, and religious persecution and freedom. She teaches courses on cultural anthropology, the anthropology of religion, African Studies, and the life course and was… Read more

Will Jones is a British academic who has been working on Central and Southern Africa, with a specialization in asylum, since 2007. He received his doctorate on refugees in Central Africa, particularly Rwanda, from the University of Oxford, where he later became a Departmental Lecturer in the Politics of Asylum at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre. He has also served as an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Excellence in Global Mobility Law and is currently an Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luca Jourdan (PhD) is Full Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Bologna. Member of the Italian Ethnological Mission in Equatorial Africa, since 2001 he has carried out a field research on youth and war, childhood crisis, informal economies and the frontier in North Kivu (Democratic Republic of Congo). He is currently carrying on a research on Eritrean refugees in Kampala and on the conflict between central government and traditional kingdoms in Kasese district.

Iranian Lawyer and PhD in Middle East international politics and law (Durham Univ) - with vast experience in producing expert reports on Iranian Law and the Judicial System; also available to comment on the authentication of legal and other official documents.

Lecturer in African studies at Edinburgh University with extensive experience researching, writing and teaching on the history, politics, and cultures of Southern Africa.

Roya Kashefi is a recognised Iran country expert who provides independent analysis and reports to international bodies, NGOs, and courts. Consulted by UN Special Rapporteurs and similar organisations, leveraging her skills in research, documentation, and advocacy, she has conducted extensive investigations into human rights violations in Iran. Her comprehensive reports and policy briefings have informed the EU Parliament’s subcommittee on Human Rights and EU Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. She actively raises awareness by presenting findings at conferences and fostering collaboration with human rights defenders through impactful advocacy campaigns.

Dr. Kenny served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali (1996-7) and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea (2002-03) for her doctorate in anthropology (2004, University of Kentucky). As a Fulbright Scholar in 2011-12, she taught Development Studies at Mzumbe University in Tanzania. She publishes on cultural topics of household, rites of passage, kinship, and gender and currently teaches at Missouri State University as an Associate Professor of Anthropology.

Dr. Kristi Kenyon is the Program Director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Winnipeg (Canada). Her research and teaching is informed by more than 20 years working in, on and with civil society organisations in Southern Africa, South East Asia and Canada in the areas of health and human rights. Her research examines the intersections between health and human rights and their social, cultural and political and legal contexts. She has a particular interest in the role that non-governmental organisations and social movements play in promoting, protecting, and interpreting human rights and health. Current projects include: a Canadian Institutes for Health Research-funded research on stigma and Lymphatic Filariasis in Ghana, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded research on gender, disability and development in South Africa, and research on the role of Vancouver's Downtown Community Court (Canada) in promoting health and well-being. Dr. Kenyon is an alumnus of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research – Azrieli Global Scholar program, and a research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Security and Development (Dalhousie University). She is the author of Resilience and Contagion: Invoking Human Rights in African HIV Advocacy… Read more

Melissa Chiovenda is an assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi. She has  been conducting research in Afghanistan since 2009. Dr. Chiovenda’s  main research in Afghanistan concerned ethnic Hazara civil society movements and the transmission of cultural trauma. Her earlier research in Afghanistan concerned Pashtun women who were working with Western NGOs. She has a PhD from the University of Connecticut in anthropology, an MA from Georgetown University in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies with a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Crises, and a BS in Russian Language and Literature from Georgetown University. Since 2016, She has been conducting research on the political identity of Afghan, mainly Hazara, refugees in Greece and Italy. She has also started projects concerning the Hazara genocide of the late 1800s, and sexual violence historically and currently experienced by Hazara women.

Prior to working in academia, Dr. Chiovenda was a high school teacher in South Los Angeles. She also worked for United States exchange programs in Russia, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and spent a summer teaching children at an organization in Nablus, West Bank.

The Expert is a practising Advocate and Barrister-at-Law in Pakistan. He is the Senior Partner of Khan & Co Barristers-at-Law and has repeatedly been appointed as an expert on Pakistani law in the UK court system. The Expert is counsel to foreign governments on Pakistani law and is a Registered Foreign Lawyer with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and practices law in the UK and in Pakistan. The Expert has provided more than 200 reports in immigration and family law cases funded by the Legal Aid Agency and the Scottish Legal Aid Board The reports provided by the Expert have addressed issues related to adultery, adoption, blasphemy, custody and abduction of children, divorce (talaq), divorce (khula), forced conversions, forced marriages, gender based violence, gender identity claims, honour killings, human trafficking, internal relocation, jirgas (tribal councils), law reform, legitimacy of children, Pakistani prisons, protection of witnesses, religious minorities and ethnic groups, statelessness, sexual orientation claims, terrorism offences and women’s protection legislation. The Expert is particularly well-versed in the Constitution of Pakistan 1973, judicial review in Pakistani courts, public law issues and national accountability cases. 

In GA v SSHD… Read more

Expert on Russia and Post-Soviet Countries, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Dr. Sana Yaseen Khudhur is an author and lecturer at the Department of Education/ Arden University.

She completed her BA in English Language and Literature at Salahaddin University/Erbil in 2011 and was awarded a scholarship to pursue MA degree in Practice of Teaching and Learning English Language. In 2014, she was awarded another scholarship to pursue a PhD in Intercultural Linguistics.

Registered as a full member of NRPSI (National Register of Public Service Interpreters)

Registered as a fellow member of CIOL (Chartered Institute of English Language Linguists)

Published a number of academic articles and books in the field of English language learning and teaching, and the experience of ESOL, EFL and ELL by Kurdish learners

Produced a number of articles on language assessment, ethnicity, country background and information, tribal and political issues in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Dr. Maria Khwaja's work spans many years conducting research in urban Pakistan across ethnic and political lines with a focus on the violence faced by children who inherit conflict political spaces. She is currently an assistant professor at Salem State University and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Khwaja's areas of expertise include children's rights and children's agency, political violence by state and non-state actors, terrorism, stateless peoples and internally displaced refugees, schooling and education of children, gender, ethnic and religious discrimination, and military and political governance and violence. Dr. Khwaja is a published academic author with a chapter on her ethnographic work with adolescents published in 2013, a forthcoming article on research methodology in the Global South pending revisions, and several articles forthcoming.