On this page, you will find:

To find organisations working for LGBTQI+ rights, visit our Sudan LGBTQI+ Resources page.
To find organisations providing legal or other types of assistance to refugees in Sudan, visit our Sudan Legal Assistance page

COI Experts

Email: arelmahdi@gmail.com

Mr Mahdi is a professional development practitioner with over 15 years of experience in international development, anchored in NGO management and programming in Sudan, South Sudan and the Middle East. He has a strong and well-developed network across Sudan and South Sudan and is well attuned to the socio-political environment in these two countries.

Email: efluehr@ric.edu

Tel: (401) 467-2857

Dr Carolyn Fluehr Lobban is a Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Rhode Island College as well an Adjunct Professor of African Studies and President of the World Affairs Council. She is a Sudanese expert and has authored and published numerous books and publications on Islamic Law and Society, Sudan`s War and Peace Agreements as well as on the National Islamic Front. Her particular research focus is on Women Rights, Gender Issues, Ethics and Human Rights. She is also an expert on other Middle Eastern countries, especially Egypt and Tunisia where she conducted fieldwork. With her husband Richard Lobban, she served as  an expert witnesses in the US for asylum cases for northern and southern Sudanese as well as for refugees from Egypt, Nigeria, Eritrea and Ethiopia for about 20 years. Those cases also included FGM cases and all of them have been won with a 100% success rate. Together with her husband she founded the Sudan Studies Association.

Tel: +44 20 76 04 30 27
Skype: george.joffe
Email: email@georgejoffe.com 

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), EuropAid and the new External Action Service.

Email: harryverhoeven33@gmail.com

Dr Harry Verhoeven is the Convenor of the Oxford University China-Africa Network, an Associate Member of the Department of Politics & International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Senior Adviser to the European Institute of Peace. Prof Verhoeven completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford, where he subsequently was a postdoctoral fellow and a Junior Research Fellow. He is the author and editor of five books and deeply invested in the human rights of individuals and communities in the countries where he works.

Email: jago.salmon@gmail.com

Sudan, Darfur, Northern Sudan

Dr Salmon is currently a programming specialist with the United Nations Development Program in Geneva focusing on post-conflict governance. He was previously based in Khartoum as a consultant for three years carrying out research in Darfur, Eastern Sudan and the Three protocol areas (Abyei, Blue Nile State, and Southern Kordofan State). Prior to this he was based at Humboldt University in Berlin as a researcher on the paramilitary forces affiliated with the state in Northern Sudan. Jago has 9 years of experience in research, consultancy and UN positions in North Sudan (including Darfur and Three Areas). His regional expertise is mainly in the Middle East/Africa (Sudan, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt) and he is proficient in English, Italian, French, German and Arabic.

Email: katarzyna.grabska@graduateinstitute.ch

Dr Kasia Grabska holds a PhD in development studies and anthropology from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She has been researching and teaching in the field of refugee and humanitarian studies since 2002. She is currently a Research Fellow Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a visiting lecturer at the Afhad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan. Her research areas include social transformations in exile among South Sudanese refugees, refugee repatriation from Kenya to South Sudan and adolescent girls’ displacement and migration in Sudan and Ethiopia.

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich

Website

Email: magnus.treiber@ethnologie.lmu.de

Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ethiopian and Eritrean Migrants in Sudan.

Dr Treiber is an anthropologist and teaches at Munich University, Germany. He has a regional focus on the Horn of Africa and can provide country of origin information for Eritrea, Ethiopia and Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants in the Sudan.

Ethiopian and Eritrean Migrants in Khartoum

Dr Treiber teaches at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, in the Department of Anthropology. Following his doctoral thesis on the life-world of young urbanites in Asmara/Eritrea (2005, University of Munich), he is currently engaged in a research project on “Dynamic Worlds of Imagination – Learning processes, knowledge and communication among young urban migrants from Eritrea and Ethiopia”, funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts in the interdisciplinary research network “migration and knowledge (formig)”. He can provide country of origin information for Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants in Khartoum, Sudan.

Email: kamal.mutaz@hotmail.com

Mr Mutaz Aljaaly is a lawyer currently practicing in Sudan, he is also a managing partner of Mutaz Aljaaly Law Firm, which is a highly reputed Khartoum based law firm, it regularly advises clients on a range of legal issues and has represented their interests in many cases before the criminal, commercial and constitutional courts of Sudan. Its lawyers are thoroughly experienced in Sudanese law in particular as it relates to human rights, humanitarian issues and immigration law.

Mr Mutaz Aljaaly, through the law firm, is prepared to undertake the following tasks;

-Prepare comprehensive country reports on legal matters, case law pertaining to Sudan.

-Represent clients in applying for asylum.

-Advise clients on obtaining refugee or humanitarian protection.

Email: nmbedri@gmail.com

Dr Nafisa M. Bedri is Associate Professor in Women and Reproductive Health at Ahfad University for Women in Sudan. She has extensive experience in managing programmes and chairing of academic committees. A researcher and trainer in the field of gender, reproductive health, management, advocacy and policy analysis skills and has written and developed several publications and training materials in these fields. She carried out several researches at national and international level in the area of gender and women‘s health for different agencies including the WHO, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNAIDS and others. She is an activist in the area of women’s reproductive and sexual rights, maternal health, violence against women, FGM/C and HIV/AIDS.

Email: peter@sudanupdate.org

Mr Verney has worked in and on Sudanese affairs since 1977, as a teacher, lecturer, aid and development worker, researcher and journalist. Editor of Sudan Update’s news digest in the 1990s, he has written reports on Sudan up to the present day, including the first book to deal with oil and conflict. He was a special adviser on Darfur to the House of Commons’ International Development Committee (2005), and has briefed the UN Environment Programme, RedR, Medecins Sans Frontieres, UK Ministry of Defence and Members of the European Parliament. He has written for Anti-Slavery International, Article 19, Index on Censorship, Minority Rights Group, the Oxford University Refugee Studies Programme website, US Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, and Freemuse (World Conference on Music and Censorship). Since 1999 he has assisted over 1200 Sudanese asylum cases, with over 45 court appearances, including UK Country Guidance cases on Darfur and Coptic Christians. Listed as a “Sudan Country Expert” by the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) in Britain, he has also given evidence by telephone to US asylum courts.

Email:  RLobban@ric.edu

Tel: +1 401 46 72 857, 603-744-6484

Dr Richard A Lobban is an anthropologist and early pioneer in social networkmodeling, archaeologist, Egyptologist, and Sudanist, foreign policy expert, human rights activist. He is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African Studies at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island since 1972; also a lecturer at the Archaeological Institute of America and the Naval War College. He is an expert in Ancient Sudan and Ancient Egypt, with a particular focus on Nubia. Lobban has authored numerous books and publications such as the Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia, Historical Dictionary of Sudan (2002), and Social Networks in Urban Sudan (1973). He has also authored/co-authored books such as Historical dictionary of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau (1997), Cape Verde: Crioulo colony to independent nation (1995), Historical dictionary of Cape Verde (2007), and Middle Eastern women and the invisible economy (1998).

Email: rmakkawi@yahoo.co.uk

Rifaat Makkawi is a sudanese lawyer and director People’s Legal Aid Center (PLACE). The center was set up in 1998 as a non-profit association of lawyers and paralegals who are dedicated to serving the needs of displaced and other marginalised people in Sudan. Mr. Rifaat Makkawi has carried out training on human rights issues for a numbers bodies in Sudan, as well as contributing to the draftings of new laws including the Child Rights Act and an act on legal aid services.

Email: rma57@georgetown.edu

Dr Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University and author of Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives (Ed.) (University of Pennsylvania Press 2006); and Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan: Politics and the Body in a Squatter Settlement(U. of Chicago Press 2009). She has conducted research in Sudan with activists working to end FGM/C.

Email: samuelayele90@gmail.com

Dr Samuel A Bekalo has conducted research and published widely on Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan. He has lived and worked in the region and regularly visits the area since the 1960s. He has written over 100 expert and documentation authentication reports on these countries. His scholarly reports are based on first-hand experience and benefit from his knowledge of Amharic, Oromo, Arabic, Tigrinya, and Kiswahili. In recent years, Dr Bekalo has worked as a Research Fellow at the International School of Education of the University of Leeds (UK), where he was involved in the capacity building project North-South Higher Education Institutions Link programme for Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.

COI Resources

The following sections contain documents that can be consulted when looking for country of origin information.

See Report here

The present report, which covers the period from January to December 2017, is submitted pursuant to Security Council resolution 2106 (2013), in which the Council requested me to report annually on the implementation of resolutions 1820 (2008),
1888 (2009) and 1960 (2010) and to recommend strategic actions. The reporting period was marked by the liberation of territories and the attendant release or escape of numerous women and girls formerly held by armed or terrorist groups. That
development has lent urgency to efforts to alleviate the stigma associated with sexual violence, which can have life-long, and sometimes lethal, repercussions for both survivors and for children conceived through rape. It also underscores the importance
of socioeconomic reintegration support aimed at restoring community cohesion in the wake of war. In the context of the mass migration crisis, sexual violence continued to serve as a driver of forced displacement and a factor inhibiting the return of uprooted communities to their places of origin. In the year under review, sexual violence was also used by belligerent parties to attack and alter the ethnic or religious identity of persecuted groups. As an integral component of strategies to secure the control of land and resources, conflict-related sexual violence has devastated the physical and economic security of displaced and rural women and women belonging to minority groups.

See Report here

The Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation (ACCORD) publishes short overviews of conflict-related incidents in Sudan based on data assembled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) of the University of Sussex.

See Report here

‘Four years ago, after 14-year-old Hassina Soulyman spent two days in labor at home, weak
from loss of blood and falling in and out of consciousness, her family knew something was
terribly wrong. They set her on a motorcycle—the only transport in her village—with two men
holding her between them for a two-hour ride to a larger village. There they waited hours for
a car to take her to one of only two hospitals in the rebel-held areas of Sudan’s Southern
Kordofan state. When they finally got her there, a doctor delivered her stillborn baby by
cesarean section and told Hassina that her cervix was too narrow to give birth vaginally.
Without adequate health information or access to contraception, Hassina became
pregnant two more times. Her second baby was delivered at the hospital but died before
reaching six months. During the last weeks of her third pregnancy, when she was 18,
Hassina and her family fled her village to escape aerial bombing by the Sudanese
government. She went into labor in the riverbed where her family was sheltering and
endured three days of obstructed labor, during which the body of the baby cleared the
birth canal but the separated head was stuck in her womb before she could get transport
to a hospital for medical assistance. She survived another operation, but as of December
2016, when Human Rights Watch met her, Hassina still did not have access to family
planning assistance.’

See Report here

‘Clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) entered their second month with detrimental impacts on civilians and on the humanitarian space. The number of persons with protection and humanitarian needs, already critical before the crisis with more than a third of the population requiring humanitarian assistance, has multiplied in all parts of Sudan either with those directly affected by the conflict or those suffering from the socioeconomic consequences, including scarcity of basic necessities, lack of access to basic services, disruption of economies and livelihood, as well as
disruption of humanitarian aid. Food and medical supply shortages persist, with protection risks on the rise to compensate. Over 1.5 million people have been displaced within and  outside Sudan, with over 1.2 million internally displaced mostly in West Darfur, White Nile and River Nile. Numbers keep increasing as the conflict continues unabated despite the declared humanitarian ceasefire. Civilians are fleeing to neighbouring countries and as of 29 May, more than 360,000 people have crossed international borders.’

See Report here

‘As the situation in Sudan remains fluid and uncertain, UNHCR calls on all countries to allow civilians of all nationalities fleeing Sudan non-discriminatory access to their territories. This applies to Sudanese nationals as well as persons of other nationalities and stateless persons, including persons who are not in possession of passports or other forms of identity documentation. The principle of non-refoulement should be respected at all times. Third country nationals who flee the conflict in Sudan but who are not in need of international protection should be allowed to access safe territory with a view to facilitating their onward travel. UNHCR is stepping up its support to Sudan’s neighbouring countries as they prepare for larger numbers of arrivals.’

Sudan Legal Assistance

Find organisations offering legal and other types of assistance to refugees in Sudan.

Sudan LGBTQI+ Resources

Find organisations working for refugee LGBTQI+ rights in Sudan.

We are always looking to expand the resources on our platform. If you know about relevant experts, or you are aware of organisations and/or resources to include in our directories, please get in touch.

Last updated January 2024