Experts on countries of origin by country

I have been conducting research on central African history and politics since I was awarded a Fulbright IIE scholarship to Gabon in 1999. I earned a MA and PhD in history from Indiana University. Since 2011, I have been a professor of history at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Through my research and my visits to both the DR Congo and Gabon, I have an extensive network of contacts in government, human rights, academic, and diplomatic circles in the Republic of Congo, Gabon, and the DRC.

Hana Rohan is a researcher and practitioner with over a decade of experience in humanitarian, development, and public health settings, with particular expertise in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She holds a doctorate in international development and has led qualitative and mixed-methods research for institutions including the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team, BBC Media Action, and international NGOs. Her work spans health systems, epidemic response, gender-based violence, and displacement, often at the intersection of conflict and structural inequality. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to high-level policy processes, bringing both academic rigour and grounded insight to her analysis. She specialises in producing clear, evidence-based expert reports that communicate complex sociopolitical contexts with accuracy and ethical care for asylum and human rights proceedings.

Tameka Romeo is a Legal Psychologist, Clinical Psychologist, Informed Practitioner in Investigative Psychology, adjunct lecturer, and consultant. She received a Joint Doctorate in Legal Psychology from Maastricht University in The Netherlands and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The findings from her studies have been presented at multiple international conferences in The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Czech Republic, and Jamaica. In 2019, she received the award for Best Paper for 2019 in the Journal of Memory & Cognition by the Psychonomic Society. An alumna of The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, she read for the degree of Master of Science in Clinical Psychology (distinction).

For over a decade, Tameka has contributed a significant portion of her expertise towards multiple social passion-projects, including offender rehabilitation, gender-based violence (GBV) awareness, and her non-governmental organisation (NGO), Mothers of the Missing and Murdered (MOMM).

Dr. Rusenko is an expert on the transhistorical role of public policy in producing and maintaining structural inequalities, particularly as relates to poverty and homelessness in Japan and Malaysia. In her academic research, she employs historical and ethnographic methods to investigate the development, implementation, and street-level impacts of historical and contemporary policies across multiple fields including housing, employment, welfare, policing, identification, urban planning, and property rights. She has 14 years of fieldwork experience in Japan and 5 years of fieldwork experience in Malaysia.

Criminologist and gender expert with over 15 years’ experience advising the United Nations, governments and international organisations on gender, women’s rights, civilian protection, reintegration, policing and security institutions, including in conflict and post-conflict settings. She is Founder and Director of Daleel Advisory, a London-based research and expert-witness practice providing country-of-origin evidence for asylum, immigration and family law proceedings.

Specialist in gender-based violence and victim-centred approaches in policing and justice contexts, with a focus on how social norms and institutional responses shape risks and access to protection. She has direct experience working with police, ministries and humanitarian actors in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine and comparable political and institutional environments. Fluent in Arabic and Ukrainian.

I am a dual-qualified legal professional with over 18 years of legal experience, specialising in both Iranian and UK legal systems. I am:

A distinguished legal expert, advisor, and former judge with extensive experience in international diplomacy, public administration, and government tenders within the Balkans region. A former advisor to the office of the President and a legal consultant for major governmental and international organizations, the expert brings unparalleled expertise in navigating the complexities of the Balkan legal and political landscapes. The expert’s career is defined by his leadership in high-level negotiations, capacity-building for public institutions, and contributions to the stabilization and development of the region.

Dr Devanik Saha is a Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Greenwich, London. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Essex working on migration, gendered violence and mental health. He holds a PhD from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.  His areas of expertise are gender, global public health, mental health, migration and refugee health, and political economy. He is also a prolific columnist having written on Indian politics, Hindu nationalism and public policy for prominent media outlets in India. He is also a recipient of the Global Talent Visa by the UK government, wherein he has been endorsed as an exceptional talent in the field of Global Health and Development. He has worked and consulted for different organizations such as Tetra Tech International, Duke NUS Medical School, BBC Media Action, UNICEF India, World Bank and other organizations.  In 2024, he was selected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London. He is also a Trustee and Board Member, Results UK, a charity focused on global health advocacy. He also advised the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) UK on various global health issues such as health systems strengthening, locally led development and emerging… Read more

LLM, Human Rights, University of East London.UK 2008   

LLB (Hons) Law, Egypt 1983-1988

BA (Bachelor of Arts) in Law, Egypt                                                International Bar Association Membership UK,1010176-2019     

Bar Association Egypt ‘’regulator lawyer’’ 131729- 1993- 2026

Human Rights (Joint Committee) UK Membership / 2007

An International Expert on Asylum & Human Rights UK 2008-2026

Experienced international trade and logistics expert specializing in infrastructure procurement, supply chain management, cross-border commercial operations, and strategic market development across emerging markets.

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.

Dr Kübra Zeynep Sariaslan is a social anthropologist specialising in gender and development with a focus on Turkey and Europe. Her book Empowering Housewives in Southeast Turkey: Gender, State, and Development is based on her dissertation, which she defended at the University of Zurich in 2018. She held a visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where she researched on civil dialogue between Turkey and Armenia. She has also been a fellow at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (Leibniz Association). Her recent work examined transnational politics and the creation of online news in exile. Currently, Dr Sariaslan is an associated researcher at the University of Bern and also teaches part-time. 

The expert is a highly experienced legal professional with extensive expertise in criminal law, immigration law, human rights, and country conditions analysis, particularly within South Asia and Southeast Asia. He has been enrolled as an Advocate of the Judge Court of Dhaka since 1989 and has been a practicing Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh since 1997. In addition, he served with distinction as an Assistant Attorney General of Bangladesh for a continuous period of nine years, from 2011 to 2019.

Dr. Megan Schmidt-Sane is a medical anthropologist with interdisciplinary training and experience in global health. She has 10+ years of research experience in Uganda on topics such as HIV/AIDS, climate change and health, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and violence. She is currently involved with projects related to climate change and health in urban sub-Saharan Africa (the Urban Futures project), on the social determinants of HIV treatment in Kampala, Uganda, and on the social dimensions of mpox outbreaks. Her experience includes work with the WHO, UNICEF, and national and local public health practitioners.

Dr David Seddon is a social scientist with more than 40 years experience in Africa and the Middle East, and Nepal, who has produced around 500 country expert witness reports 

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.

Samantha Serrano earned her Sc.D. in Collective Health from the Federal Medical School of São Paulo. Her research was the Bolivian immigrant women’s experiences in motherhood and family healthcare in São Paulo, Brazil. She has an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her Master’s thesis was an institutional ethnography on the perceptions and treatments of the sexuality and sexual abuse of people with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses in urban Guatemala. 

Samantha has multiple international and domestic publications and has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Guatemala and Brazil. Her areas of specialization include: the social determinants of health, health systems and policies, immigrant healthcare, intercultural healthcare, primary healthcare access, healthcare and disability, transnational motherhood, sexual violence, domestic violence, ethnography and qualitative research methods.

Hemn Seyedi holds a PhD in Kurdish Studies, University of Exeter. He was also awarded Mphil in Iranian Studies (2019) and MSc in Middle East Politics (2017). With the cooperation of some colleagues, Seyedi established the Middle East Institution for Democratic Developments, MEIDD, focusing on research and democratic developments in the Middle East.

One of the main services of the institution is providing professional advice and reports to the courts, solicitors, and the Home Office case workers. It can offer impartial, evidence-based, and fresh analysis of the socio-political situations in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, including the governments and societies within these countries.

Hemn Seyedi is in contact with people from these countries, ranging from ordinary individuals to lecturers, journalists, and lawyers. He is also in partnership with universities, institutions, and research centres within the region and globally, which work on Middle Eastern politics and its social changes.

Alongside the research and academic activities, Seyedi is active on social media, with 21,000 followers on Facebook, 68,000 on Instagram, and 91,000 on X (formerly Twitter), mainly from Iran and Iraq. The reason for this influence is that he has been a public figure on Farsi… Read more

Experienced in working with diverse populations, including women and girls, children and youth, refugees, internally displaced persons returnees, migrants, persons with disabilities, minority groups, rural communities, and marginalized populations. Strong commitment to inclusive development approaches, gender equality, social protection, human rights, accountability to affected populations, and sustainable solutions that strengthen community resilience. 

Fluent in English with professional experience working in multilingual and multicultural settings, including collaboration with French, Arabic, and local-language-speaking communities through direct communication and interpretation support where required. Experienced in navigating complex cultural and political environments while building trust and effective partnerships with national and international stakeholders.

I am a UK trained Barrister and practicing law in Bangladesh with experience across a wide range of practice areas, including banking and financial institutions, employment law, anti-corruption and money laundering, immigration and citizenship law, Human rights law, Criminal law, civil justice and litigation-related work.

My professional work involves providing legal analysis, research, advisory services, and submissions on complex legal and regulatory issues. I have been regularly engaged by renowned national and multinational companies and institutions, offering expertise on compliance, risk, and legal frameworks within Bangladesh.

In addition to my domestic legal experience, I work as an independent country expert, specialising in the Bangladeshi and Myanmar legal and justice systems. My role includes preparing expert opinions, country reports, and legal assessments for international organisations, law firms, and other stakeholders. 

I also engage with international human rights standards and their application to the Bangladeshi context, including obligations under key treaties relating to torture, arbitrary detention, fair trial rights, and freedom of expression. I am experienced in presenting complex country conditions clearly and professionally… Read more