Experts on countries of origin by country

PhD in Social Science, sociologist and human rights expert specialising in country conditions analysis related to political violence, forced displacement, and asylum claims in Latin America. 

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.

Dr Abdoul Aziz Dieng is a Senegalese-born, UK-based Senegal Country Expert and Sociolinguistic Consultant specialising in Senegalese language, culture, migration, diaspora identity and multilingual practices. His doctoral research focused on Senegalese transmigrants and their cultural and language practices and is the author of Urban Wolof across Borders: Translanguaging while Transmigrating (2024, Palgrave).

His expertise is particularly relevant to asylum and immigration matters involving Senegal, including Wolof and Fula/Pulaar language issues, cultural plausibility, family and community dynamics, migration histories, diaspora experience, reintegration, and the interpretation of Senegalese social and linguistic practices. He is also NRPSI-registered and a full member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

Sergen Bahceci is a political anthropologist who examines violence and its role in constituting everyday life and lived experiences. He completed a PhD in Anthropology at LSE in 2023. For his doctoral research, he conducted 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Cyprus among elderly war veterans and younger generations of Cypriots who were born after the island’s civil war (1955 - 1974).

Following his PhD, he worked as a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Criminology where he was employed to conduct digital ethnographic fieldwork in Macclesfield, England, on everyday experiences of crime-related insecurity. He previously taught anthropology at Goldsmiths and University College London, and also worked for the UN Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus in 2020. He has also provided a COI expert witness report for a deportation order appeal tribunal. 

Mr. Bahiss is a senior analyst with International Crisis Group’s Asia Program. He specialises on armed groups, security and governance in Afghanistan, and his work has been published by various international media and research organisations. 

Harina is an accomplished lawyer with an LL.M. in Criminal Law, graduating with first-class honours. Her academic journey includes a distinguished dissertation exploring the socio-legal dimensions of live-in relationships in India. With a strong foundation in law and a keen interest in addressing socio-legal complexities, Harina has built a diverse and impactful legal career.

Her professional experience spans multiple areas of law, including Indian Family Law and Society, Civil and Criminal Laws, Child Custody and Abduction, Indian Citizenship and Nationality Laws, and Indian Employment Law, among various others. She has worked on a diverse array of legal matters, showcasing her expertise in drafting legal documents, including agreements, employment contracts, and mandates, with a strong emphasis on ensuring compliance with applicable laws and addressing client-specific requirements. She also provided comprehensive legal opinions on a wide range of matters involving Indian Family Law, Contract Law, Indian Employment Law(s), etc., to foreign missions in India.  

Harina further prepared detailed Expert Reports and Expert Witness Statements on Indian law and Society, which were submitted in foreign courts that addressed… Read more

Dr. Baird is a Professor of Geography and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the coordinator of the Hmong Studies Consortium at UW-Madison, and the PI for the Lao American Archive Project at UW-Madison. Dr Baird was previously the Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UW-Madison, and remains on the Center's Steering Committee. He is also affiliated with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison.

Dr. Baird has been living, working and conducting research in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia since the late 1980s. He’s lived in Laos for 15 years, and in Thailand for 10 years. He remains active in conducting research in all three countries. Dr. Baird’s areas of interest include, but are not limited to, environmental issues, Indigenous Peoples and ethnic minorities, politics, development studies, marginalization, poverty, cross-border issues, insurgency, social services, and immigration.

Beth Baker-Cristales is a cultural anthropologist with over thirty years of experience documenting the life conditions of people forced to flee Central America, particularly to the U.S .She taught anthropology and Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles for over 20 years and is currently a visiting instructor in the University of California Washington Program (UCDC). Dr. Baker-Cristales worked with immigrant rights organizations in Los Angeles, including El Rescate, CARECEN, and CHIRLA, and she continues immigrant rights work in the Washington metro area, volunteering with CASA and local immigrant mutual aid groups. She has worked in the legal departments of some of these nonprofit organizations, helping people complete applications for asylum and citizenship, and she has written expert testimony for asylum cases involving people forced to flee for their political work and for domestic or gender-based violence.

Ibrahim Bangura has worked extensively in the fields of Transitional Justice, Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration of Ex-Combatants, Security Sector Reform, Sustainable Livelihoods, Gender and Conflict Resolution in Africa.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and History and a Master’s degree in Gender Studies from University of Sierra Leone; another Master’s degree in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam; and a Doctorate degree in Economics from the Leipzig Graduate School of Management in Germany.

He currently lectures at the Peace and Conflict Studies Programme, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, and he is also a senior partner at Transition International, a consultancy firm based in the Netherlands.

Susan Banki studies the political, institutional, and social contexts that explain the roots of and solutions to human rights violations and social justice abuses. In particular, she is interested in the ways that questions of sovereignty, transnationalism, and citizenship/membership have shaped our responses to conflict and injustice, particularly examining institutions such as the international refugee regime, diasporas, and the humanitarian system. Susan's focus is in the Asia-Pacific region, where she has conducted extensive field research in Thailand, Myanmar/Burma, Cambodia, Nepal, Bangladesh and Japan on refugee/migrant protection, statelessness and border control. Her current projects include: the work of diasporas in responding to acute crises at home; humanitarian responses to complex displacement contexts; and the role of creative arts in transnational activism.

Dr Charles Beach is a social anthropologist specialising in the Colombia–Venezuela borderlands of Norte de Santander and Táchira. His doctoral research at UCL, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the border city of Cúcuta and the rural border municipality of Ragonvalia, examined illegalised cross-border economies, the collective organising of gasoline smugglers, and the relationships between non-state armed actors, state institutions and border communities. 

His areas of knowledge include armed-actor control of formal and informal border crossings; the treatment of trade unionists and social leaders and the operation of Colombia's National Protection Unit; extortion and informal taxation at the border; the legacies of paramilitary violence and enforced disappearance in Norte de Santander; and Venezuelan migration into Colombia. He worked as an ethnographic consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank on a qualitative study of Venezuelan migrants' access to healthcare in Colombian and Peruvian cities during the COVID-19 pandemic, published in the Journal of Migration and Health. He co-edited Contraband Cultures: Reframing Smuggling across Latin America and the Caribbean (UCL Press, 2024) and has published further peer-reviewed work on Colombian… Read more

Freelance Horn of Africa advisor/consultant.  Produced over 100 country reports (on Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, The Sudan) for various organisations and legal firms.

Specializing in US and Canadian cases, Owen Bennett-Jones has world-respected knowledge of Pakistan's militants, military, intelligence services, ethnic groups, political parties, Shias and honor killings  He has worked for the BBC and was a visiting Professor at Princeton University and USC.

The expert is Full Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz (Germany). She has served as an expert since 2014.

The Expert reads all relevant papers relating to a client free of charge and produces a short report on the case details. He relates these to the evidence already given and how he considers the subsequent hearing will be influenced by these. He rejects requests, if he feels there is very little chance of the client being offered permission to remain. He accepts payment in instalments.

Licensed attorney (Juris Doctor, admitted to the Philippine Bar) and human rights researcher specialising in political opinion, religion, ethnicity, gender-based and LGBT cases, and nationality across Southeast Asia. Specialises in country expert reports, document verification, nationality assessments and expert testimony in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Jelke Boesten is an interdisciplinary social scientist trained as a historian. She has 25 years of research experience in Peru, focusing on gender-based violence, women and the state/state policy, conflict-related sexual violence, and the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s.

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