Dr Rebwar Fatah
Email: rebwar@mideastconsultancy.com or info@mideastconsultancy.com
Dr Rebwar Fatah is the Director of the Middle East Consultancy Services. Dr Fatah has produced thousands of COI reports since he began working as an expert witness in 2000. In the past five years alone, Dr Fatah has produced 1,341 Expert Reports on the Middle East. These include:
- 830 Country Expert Reports
- 416 Document Authentication Reports
- 95 Nationality Reports
Dr Fatah’s reports have been commissioned for and cited in several immigration appeals, as well as family and criminal cases. Moreover, he has assessed many people from the Middle East whose nationality, native language, ethnicity, place of residence has been disputed, and has examined thousands of documents from the MENA region. In addition to a deep knowledge of the region’s administrative and bureaucratic cultures, Dr Fatah’s multilingual proficiencies enable him to understand, interpret and evaluate official documents in the Middle East. As a part of this work, Dr Fatah has produced his own methodology for document authentications and nationality examinations.
Dr Fatah has also provided written and oral evidence in court; among them are five Country Guidance Cases, two Turkish extradition orders and many other cases. Moreover, Dr Fatah has also reviewed and provided guidance on Home Office CPIN reports.
Dr Fatah regularly visits the Middle East, conducting fact-finding missions to ensure that his knowledge is up to date and based on reliable information. Dr Fatah speaks most of the Middle Eastern languages as well as their various dialects. Dr Fatah’s Country Expert Reports cover a wide range of issues, including the general security situation, sufficiency of protection, crimes of honour, healthcare, corruption, and at-risk groups of different sexual, religious, political and cultural profiles.
Dr Alan George
Email: arg1@compuserve.com
Dr George is a consultant, writer and journalist, with extensive knowledge of the Middle East. Since 1984 he has worked as a freelance journalist, researcher and expert witness in political asylum cases involving the Middle East. He frequently commentates on Middle Eastern affairs for radio and television and contributes to the Observer, the Independent and the Guardian. He is a former Head of Research at the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce and a former Assistant Director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU). Since 2003, Dr George has acted as an Expert Witness for UK, US and European asylum and immigration tribunals, dealing with cases involving Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories and has produced some 4,000 reports.
Dr Farangis Ghaderi
Email: info@middleast-consulting.com or f.ghaderi@exeter.ac.uk
Website:www.middleast-consulting.com
Dr Farangis Ghaderi is an academic and an independent Middle East expert with extensive experience in providing country expert reports, nationality assessment reports, and document authentication for court purposes. She is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the University of Exeter and the director of Middle East Consulting Ltd. Dr Ghaderi holds a PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter. She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles on Kurdish literature and culture and the co-editor of Derwaze, Kurdish peer-reviewed journal in humanities and social sciences. She speaks fluent Kurdish and Farsi and has a working knowledge of Arabic and Dari. She has studied different Kurdish dialects and has prepared expert language reports for Kurdish asylum seekers whose nationality have been disputed. Dr Ghaderi is prepared to provide country expert reports on Iran, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Turkey.
Mr Martin Jerrett
Email: martin_jerrett@yahoo.com
From 2003-2008, Mr Jerrett worked in Iraq and also in Qatar for the UK Ministry of Defence as a Subject Matter Expert for the Iraqi Survey Group. He worked on a GIS mapping project and a tribal database in Iraq. Martin worked in a regional crime liaison office for Iraq on Doha, where he received recognition for his efforts and achievements. Mr Jerrett speaks Arabic and has also done extensive work in Libya and Yemen.
Dr George Joffé
Tel: +44 20 76 04 30 27
Email: email@georgejoffe.com / Skype: george.joffe
Professor Joffé is prepared to provide country of origin experts witness statements for Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morroco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. He is now retired but is still affiliated to the London Middle East Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Until 2017, Professor Joffé was an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) in the University of Cambridge, where he also ran the Centre for North African Studies. From 2005 to 2010, he was a research fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford. From 1997 to 2000, Professor Joffé was the deputy director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He regularly addresses professional audiences at the NATO Defence College in Rome, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Geneva, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and NOREF in Oslo and the Royal College of Defence Studies in London. He has also advised the European Commission (DG Relex), EuropeAid and the new External Action Service.
Mr Riad al Khouri
Email: ralkhouri@gmail.com
A Jordanian economist specializing in the Middle East & North Africa, Riad has for over forty years trained, lectured, advised, and researched on a wide variety of socio-economic and other topics such as good governance, migration (including refugees), foreign aid, human rights, post-crisis economies, strategic planning, cultural familiarization, conflict resolution, NGOs, and sustainable development. His mother tongue is Arabic, and he is also fluent in English, with a strong working knowledge of French. Riad lives in Jordan and is a leading expert on the country and MENA generally, working locally and around the region at all levels with numerous Jordanian and international organizations, and writing and publishing widely on the country as well as regionally.
Dr Scott Long
Email: scottlong1980@gmail.com
Dr Scott Long, PhD, Harvard, has led a long career in LGBTI rights activism focusing on Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa. He has taught in Hungary, Romania and the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School. Dr Scott Long was programme director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) from 1996 to 2002 and led the organisation’s advocacy at the 2001 UN General Assembly’s Special Session on HIV/AIDS. He founded and directed the Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Rights Program until 2010 and has produced reports on the situation of LGBTI persons in Egypt, Iraq and Iran, discrimination against binational same-sex couples in the United States, as well as working with LGBTI activists in Russia. Dr Scott Long blogs on human rights-related issues on http://paper-bird.net/ .
Thomas McGee
Email: thomas.mcgee@cantab.net
Telephone number: +44 75 94 70 42 72
Website: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/students/grd/students/thomas-mcgee
Twitter page: @ThMcGee
Thomas McGee (BA Cantab; MA Exon) is an expert on stateless Kurds of Syria, and authentication of documents related to stateless Kurds (ajanib & maktumeen). He speaks Arabic and Kurdish (Kurmanci dialect). Thomas is currently a PhD Researcher at Melbourne Law School’s Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness.
Ms Natalia Tereshchenko
Email: 2t.natalia@gmail.com
Ms Natalia Tereshchenko is a researcher and project manager at the Oriental Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, where she focuses on religious and ethnic minority rights in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. She is also a researcher at the global online consultancy, Wikistrat.
Previously, Natalia has been working on legal assistance for Afghanistan through UNODC and has served as the Vice-Chair of the International Refugee Law Committee at the American Bar Association.
Natalia’s expertise also includes issues of non-traditional security threats, negotiations with non-state actors and conflict transformation.
Reports, Commentaries and Relevant Documents
- Commentary on the December 2011 Iraq OGN . Published by Still Human, Still Here with commentaries on the Operational Guidance Notes (OGN) issued by the UK Border Agency on Iraq. This is intended as a tool to assist legal practitioners to identify the relevant country of origin information and to help ensure that all relevant material is considered by decision-makers.