Experts on countries of origin by country

Associate Professor at King’s College London with over two decades of internationally recognised expertise on crime, corruption, policing, prisons and criminal justice reform across the former Soviet Union. Known for combining rigorous academic research with high-level policy advisory roles for international organisations as well as UK and US government departments.

I am available to produce general country expert evidence reports on political, social, and economic conditions, corruption and crime environments, state protection capacity, and risks faced by specific social groups in my countries of expertise. I also provide expert reports and testimony for cases involving risks from political activism, exposure of corruption or organised crime, trafficking and exploitation, state collusion with criminal groups, police corruption, and inhumane detention conditions in former Soviet Union countries.

I have extensively travelled and conducted field research across former Soviet Union countries, gaining a deep understanding of how informal networks, weak rule of law, and criminal-state nexus structures create specific vulnerabilities for asylum claimants. My research has been published in leading academic journals and briefed to senior policymakers and officials… Read more

Joshua Kurlantzick is Senior Fellow for South Asia and Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he studies South Asian and Southeast Asian politics and economics, with a particular focus on democracy, authoritarianism, human rights, and political transitions. Experienced country of origin expert for all nationals from Southeast Asia and China; specialist from one of the leading think-tanks in the world. Have provided expert witness reports for fifteen years for asylum cases in the UK, Europe, and US for nationals from across South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia – related to political issues, trafficking, slavery, gangs, religion, and many other issues. Also have provided expert witness reports for non-asylum immigration cases for nationals from South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia.

Extensive experience in expert reports on all the countries listed, and also in particular, Kurds in country of origin and diaspora

Dr. Laker is a seasoned conflict, security and development practitioner with 15 years of experience with a specialized focus on forced displacement, gender, security sector reform, international humanitarian law, and transitional justice. Dr. Laker's consulting, research, and academic interests are grounded in the field of defence, strategic studies and international relations. He is currently Assistant Professor in international humanitarian law, conflict, security, military ethics, humanitarianism, and air, land, and sea operations to both junior and senior military officers, at Zayed Military University in Abu Dhabi, UAE. His book manuscript, Rethinking Internal Displacement: Geo-Political Games, Fragile States, & the Relief Industry was published in 2021. 

Intercultural and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, specialising in issues relevant to various Muslim countries, incl vendettas, honour killing, domestic violence, PTSD, Rape Trauma Syndrome, assault in detention and traumas of migration and exile.

Gideon Lasco, MD, PhD is a physician and medical anthropologist. He is senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman's Department of Anthropology, affiliate faculty at the UP College of Medicine’s Social Medicine Unit, research fellow at the Ateneo de Manila University's Development Studies Program, and honorary fellow at Hong Kong University's Centre for Criminology. 

I am a country-of-origin expert witness for Afghanistan. I prepare expert reports on different issues related to Afghan nationals for asylum, family and criminal cases. 

I also verify the authenticity of documents issued in Afghanistan. I have completed my degree at the King’s College London and am studying for a Diploma in Linguistics. 

Academic and practicing attorney, based in USA (admitted to AZ bar), experienced in written and oral expert reports in variety of national formats, on many social groups and diverse matters in West Africa and Africa broadly.

Depending on issue/claim basis, I may be able to provide expertise on any country in West Africa. I have testified and provided expertise for cases from: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, The Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

Professor Leclerc-Madlala is an anthropologist whose research and publications since 1995 have focused on the intersections of culture, sexuality, gender and HIV in Africa, especially in South Africa and in relation to young women’s vulnerability. Her academic work as former Professor and Head of the Anthropology Department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal was complimented by active involvement in the design, implementation and evaluation of HIV programs in South Africa and its neighboring countries. Dr. Leclerc Madlala retired as Senior Advisor for HIV and Health with the US Agency for International Development and currently serves as an Affiliated Senior  Researcher with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Professor Leclerc-Madlala got her start in development as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Gabon.

Prof Leclerc-Madlala has worked as a consultant to UNAIDS, SADC, the World Bank, and WHO, as well as to several regional non-government organizations and community-based organizations. She helped to draft South Africa’s Sexual Offences Act and the Children’s Bill and authored UNAIDS’ 2009 Action Brief on Inter-generational and Transactional sex in Southern Africa. She worked with the Commission on Gender… Read more

Dr. Elena Lesley is an anthropologist who has been working in Cambodia since the early 2000s. Much of her research has focused on mental illness and access to health services. She is particularly interested in cases related to mental illness or disability, addiction, healthcare systems and torture.

Natalie Letsa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. Previously, she was the Wick Cary Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the Director of OU’s African Studies Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University in 2017, and in 2018-19 she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

Jordan Levy is a sociocultural anthropologist with a research program focused on state formation, political culture, and out-migration in Honduras. He has been studying Honduras and conducting non-governmental (NGO) work in the country since 2001. He was present during the 2009 military coup, and has since studied how these events polarized Honduran society and have increased different forms of violence.

Dr. Levy’s doctoral dissertation focused on the political activism of schoolteachers and post-coup policies of governance. He has conducted expensive ethnographic research in Tegucigalpa and the Honduran South, through which he has learned about Hondurans’ experiences with gang-related violence, gender-based violence, and the persecution of political activists. At DePaul University (Chicago) he teaches a variety of courses for the Anthropology major, is an affiliated faculty member of the Latin American & Latino Studies program, and serves on the DePaul Migration Collaborative advisory council.

Tim Lindsey is leading expert on Indonesian law, and has advised governments, business, international organisations, courts and legal practitioners around the world, giving expert evidence in many courts and tribunals. He is Malcolm Smith Professor of Asian Law, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the Melbourne Law School. He holds a Bachelor of Laws, Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Letters from the University of Melbourne and completed his PhD thesis in Indonesian studies. A fluent Indonesian speaker, he is a specialist in a wide range of aspects of Indonesian law, including public law, citizenship law, criminal law, commercial law, inheritance, and family law. He has won teaching awards and has previously practised as barrister. His more than 100 publications include Indonesia: Law and Society; Islam, Law and the State in Southeast Asia (three volumes); The Indonesian Constitution; Drugs Law and Practice in Southeast Asia; Religion, Law and Intolerance in Indonesia; Strangers Next Door: Indonesia and Australia in the Asian Century; Crime and Punishment in Indonesia; Indonesian Law; and The Routledge Handbook of Indonesian Law (in press, 2026) He is a founder and an… Read more

Marilisa Lorusso is a regular contributor to Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa, an Italian think tank and online magazine with approximately 5,000 daily views.

She has been deployed by the Italian Foreign Ministry as an expert for post-war civilian monitoring missions in Georgia. Additionally, she has served in a non-diplomatic capacity at the Geneva International Discussions on the Georgian peace settlement while based at the European Union Council in Brussels.

Candace Lukasik is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. Her research explores religion and the transnational politics of violence, migration, race, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas. She was previously a Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, an AAUW American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellow, Affiliate Faculty Member in the Department of Anthropology at University at Buffalo, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Her first book, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, 2025) examines how American theopolitical imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom in migration. Drawing on continuing fieldwork with Assyrians in Detroit and northern Iraq, her second book project, Somewhere Else: Political Ecologies and Indigenous Sovereignty in Global Assyria… Read more

Recognized for delivering high-quality analysis, identifying emerging trends, and offering practical recommendations based on local expertise and reliable data.

Dr. Frédérick Madore is a Data Curator at the Cluster of Excellence "Africa Multiple", University of Bayreuth (Germany). Through extensive fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Togo, and Burkina Faso, he has developed deep expertise in understanding how religious groups navigate social and political change. His research includes contributions to the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database documenting Islam in West Africa.

His book on religious activism at universities in Togo and Benin examines the transformation of campus life through faith-based organizations since the 1970s. Previously, he held positions as Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Germany) and Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Florida (USA). Dr. Madore has published extensively on Muslim societies and religious movements, including two monographs, an edited volume, and numerous peer-reviewed articles. His research offers new insights into the dynamics of Islam and religious movements in contemporary West Africa.

Rodolfo Maggio is an anthropologist of the Asia-Pacific region currently working at the University of Helsinki. In the past, he taught anthropology at the University of Turin and has worked as a Special Foreign Researcher at Waseda University (2019-20), Tokyo, and as a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford (2015-18). Maggio's ethnographic expertise centers on the Solomon Islands, where she has conducted immersive fieldwork exploring postcolonial tensions, cultural practices, and social conflicts. Her forthcoming work examines witchcraft accusations by covering visible and invisible dimensions of witch hunts in postcolonial contexts. He addresses land tenure disputes by tracing the history of land policy in Solomon Islands and analyzes internal relocation, highlighting adaptations of "home" amid displacement. Recent pieces on the 2021 Honiara riots and Malaita's renegade status further illuminate risks of retaliation, political subjectivation, and multi-ethnic nation-state dynamics. On child protection, he critiques early intervention programs in Ireland and the UK, linking austerity to perinatal mental health and ethics in ethnographic studies of mothers and services. He tackles decolonial discourse analysis of media, with a focus on Chinese influence in… Read more

Saqeb Mahbub is a UK-educated Barrister, independent judicial reform consultant and part-time Lecturer at North South University based in Bangladesh. Besides legal practice, the expert is regularly consulted by international organisations such as UNDP, UNHCR and USAID. He has conducted research, advisory and consultancy work in Bangladesh on the formal and informal justice systems, freedom of speech and other political rights, anti-corruption, violence against women, minority rights, etc. Saqeb Mahbub has produced expert reports for UK and US courts and tribunals covering the following topics:
(i) Political situation in Bangladesh (including in-depth analysis of all the political parties (BNP, Jamaat, etc), senior and local leaders of opposition parties);
(ii) The criminal justice system; 
(iii) Laws curtailing free speech, state attitude towards opposition;
(iii) Judicial independence;
(iv) Freedom of speech; 
(v) Extra judicial killings;
(vi) Enforced disappearances;
(vii) Police Harassment; 
(viii) Ghost and False cases;
(ix) Persecution of human rights defenders; 
(x) Persecution of LGBTQ community members; 
(xi) Persecution of religious minorities and violent extremism;
… Read more

Md Salahuddin Mahmud is a Lincoln’s Inn Barrister and an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh with over 17 years of legal practice and country expertise on Bangladesh. He specialises in constitutional, criminal, human rights, and immigration law, with particular expertise in political, religious, ethnic, and social group persecution, rule of law, electoral governance, state accountability, and the operation of the judiciary and law enforcement agencies. He is the Head of Chambers of Salahuddin & Associates, Legal Adviser to the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD), and a Listed Counsel of the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (UN-IRMCT) and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC), The Hague.

https://scba.org.bd/members_directory.php

KSC List of Counsel-English