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. 

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.

The expert is a seasoned International Analyst and Political Scientist, specializing in humanitarian disarmament, arms control, and criminal structures operating in the Latin America and Caribbean region, with extensive experience in NGOs in Argentina and Colombia. His research and academic endeavors are dedicated to addressing pressing issues in defense, security, and humanitarian efforts in the region.

I analyze emerging and developing markets focusing on how economic structures and institutions shape real outcomes. My work delivers practical insights on risk, growth, and structural constraints based on how these politics and economies actually function on the ground.

Dr. Harding earned a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Miami with specializations in Latin American Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, and International Relations. His major professor and dissertation chair was the late Dr. Enrique Baloyra, a renowned Cuba-born scholar. Dr. Harding has held full-time academic appointments in Virginia, Alabama, and most recently Georgia, where he is the Professor of Political Science at Valdosta State University. He is the author of three books and several book chapters as well as over a dozen journal articles. Dr. Harding has been an invited presenter on Latin American politics in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He has been a federally recognized asylum expert since 2018, working for asylum attorneys throughout the United States as well as the UK and and the Netherlands.

The Expert has expertise on forced displacement and migration in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean and the links with gang violence, organised crime and corruption in the region. For the last fifteen years they have conducted academic and professional research on migration and internal displacement linked to violence, criminal groups and impunity in Central America and Mexico and on human trafficking in the broader region of Latin America and Caribbean, making several fieldwork trips and authoring NGOs reports and academic articles. They also have expertise in gender issues in the region, including gender-based violence, LGBTQ+ discrimination and hate crimes, and access to abortion and reproductive rights, including judicial persecution related to this.

The expert has ten years of experience writing expert witness reports for dozens of cases in the United Kingdom asylum system, with numerous judges commenting in determinations on how useful, relevant and comprehensive their reports are in informing decisions.

Dr. Sandoval-Cervantes is a cultural anthropologist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He is an UDLAP alum, and obtained his PhD from the University of Oregon in 2016. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). In the Spring 2022 semester, He will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School where he will be working on his project “Dead Letter”: Animal Law, Activism, and Mexican Politics," which is part of a new research on the animal rights movement in urban Mexico. 

His research interests can be divided into two overlapping sub-fields. The first sub-field includes the anthropology of migration, particularly the analysis of internal and transnational migrations, gender (masculinity and femininity), indigeneity, kinship, and care. The second sub-field includes multi-species ethnography, legal anthropology and the anthropology of social movements, particularly through the study of activism and animal rights in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.

My work has equipped me to evaluate country conditions through a disciplined framework that considers security, governance, community dynamics, institutional behavior, and vulnerability in combination, rather than in isolation. My expertise is especially relevant where a case turns on whether an individual could reasonably obtain protection, safely relocate, or avoid persecution, serious harm, reprisals, extortion, gang coercion, political targeting, gender-based violence, or reprisals linked to family or community structures. I assess, where relevant, whether state protection is available, effective, and accessible in practice; whether criminal or political actors can act with impunity or informal protection; whether relocation within the country would be realistic and durable; how local factors affect the risk profile of the individual concerned; and whether socio-economic, ethnic, political, or family-based vulnerabilities materially increase exposure to harm.

Karen S. Rotabi-Caseres is Professor of Social Work at California State University- Monterey Bay. She has extensive international experience, with an emphasis on Guatemala, El Salvador and Somalia. Her practice in these countries is oriented to child protection as well as violence against women. She has worked as an expert witness, mainly for Guatemala, but recent work in Somalia has expanded her area of expertise.  She has an extensive publication history, with an orientation to human rights.

The Expert is a Barrister-at-Law of England and Wales. The Expert is a practicing Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. He holds the position of Head of Chambers at "LexAria and Jurists" (link : https://lexariaandjurists.com/) , and President at "Justice for All', with nearly a decade's experience in legal practice. The expert regularly moves before the Supreme Court of Bangladesh for various matters including Writ (Judicial Review), Criminal and Civil Appeal and Revision, Bail Petition, Intellectual Property, Company Matter, Inheritance, Public Interest Litigation, Muslim Personal Law, Succession Law, Hindu Law, etc.

As a practicing Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, the expert is legally qualified to verify any legal documents including case, GD, judgments and other relevant documents, and check records from the government office of Bangladesh including Courts and Tribunals unless restricted by the law or relevant office. 

Parallel to his legal pursuits, the expert is the Legal Affairs and Political Editor of The Daily Campus and columnist. Accumulatively, he possesses over 18 years of sustained experience as a Journalist in Bangladesh, having written extensively on a broad range of issues, including human rights, the criminal justice… Read more