Experts on countries of origin by surname

Lebanese lawyer, admitted to the Beirut Bar Association in 2016, with more than ten years of litigation before every level of the Lebanese courts. Her country evidence work rests on that practice: the confessional personal status system and what it means for women and children, civil registry and identity records, and the point at which state protection stops working.

Sayana Namsaraeva is a senior research associate at the Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge. After graduating in China Studies at the University of Saint Petersburg, she did her MA degree in Comparative Ethnography at National Chengchi University (Taipei).  She was awarded a PhD degree  in Political and Cultural History of Pre-modern China at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Moscow, RAS), held research positions at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology  (Halle, Germany) and taught as a lecturer at the Institute for Studies of Religions and the Central Asia at the University of Bern (Switzerland). Throughout her academic career spanning over twenty five  years, her research interests embrace a wide range of topics in Mongolian and China studies, Siberian Studies, Buryat Diasporas and Kinship, Migration and Border Studies, with a particular attention to North Asian borderlands. She teaches a course on ‘Borders and Borderlands in North Asia’ for Inner Asia Paper at the Department of Social Anthropology. 

She has served as a COI expert since 2018, responding to cases from Mongolian and Russian citizens. Based on more than twenty cases she reviewed, Sayana analytically summarized … Read more

Hatem Nasr is an Egyptian Court of Cassation Advocate, an SRA Registered Foreign Lawyer in England and Wales (Registration No. 7054130), and an Independent Country Conditions and Document Authenticity Expert. He is the Founder and CEO of X Solutions UK, established in 2017, with over 14 years of professional experience in Egyptian law, judicial procedures, human rights and international legal matters.

He specialises in Egyptian criminal and civil law, political persecution, national security-related proceedings, asylum and international protection, risk on return, state protection, internal relocation, nationality and citizenship disputes, religious persecution, gender-based violence, and the examination and verification of official judicial and administrative documents.

He prepares independent country conditions reports, document authenticity reports and expert opinions for solicitors, law firms, courts and tribunals in the United Kingdom and internationally. His professional casework during 2025–2026 has involved approximately 300 matters, including legal analysis, country conditions research, document examination and international protection-related work.

He is also listed as a country expert with the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS),… Read more

Dr. Andrew Nelson is an applied cultural anthropologist with a focus on urban and migration studies. While the bulk of his ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in Nepal, he also has experience doing research in India, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the United States. With Rob Curran, he co-wrote Journey without End: Migration from the Global South through the Americas (Vanderbilt Press, 2022), and with Roos Willems and Alex Rödlach, he co-edited The Crux of Resettlement: Rebuilding Social Networks (Lexington Press, 2018). He has also published academic articles on Nepali-speaking refugees from Bhutan, and Nepali migrants in South and North America. Currently, he is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Texas.

The Expert is a social anthropologist with special interest on Anthropology and ethnography in Africa.

The Expert is a columnist, writing on Vietnam. He has focused on producing expert reports in relation to Vietnam issues. He has good experience in providing country expert reports for immigration solicitors representing Vietnamese clients. He also attended several conferences and expert group meetings like The Global Organized Crime Index in the past. He is a graduate of the The University of West London with a 2:1 degree. His research and publications have focused on economic, financial, social, political developments human trafficking, political dissent, religious freedom, human trafficking and the Vietnam state security system cracking down on dissidents so on.