Expert Contributors

Elizabeth Atieno

Elizabeth Atieno is a women’s rights activist, Pan-African feminist, and survivor advocate. Her work is deeply informed by her personal experience as a survivor of conflict-related sexual violence and as a mother to a child born of rape. Her journey of pain, resilience, and transformation drives her commitment to advancing justice, dignity, and reparations for survivors and their children.

Elizabeth’s advocacy focuses on survivor-centered approaches, inclusive policies, and accountability mechanisms that not only challenge stigma but also promote healing. She is dedicated to ensuring that survivors and children born of sexual violence are recognized as agents of change and rights-holders, rather than mere symbols of tragedy. Currently, Elizabeth serves as a member of the Survivor Expert Roster for the Stigma Toolkit for Justice, where she contributes her expertise to further stigma-sensitive justice interventions.

Doris G. Awwad is a senior MENA expert working at the intersection of political advocacy, public policy, Women, Peace and Security (WPS), peacebuilding, and transitional justice. She brings over 17 years of experience across conflict and post-conflict contexts, with a strong focus on Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. Holding an MA in Gender & Global Politics (SOAS University of London), she supports civil society and international actors through research, policy papers, and advocacy strategy, advancing inclusive governance and strengthening women’s meaningful participation in decision-making.

Her work also spans gender, human rights, and development, and she is known for combining rigorous analysis with practical, field-informed insight. She conducts contextualised gender, political, and rights-based research; develops gender-responsive strategies and peacebuilding frameworks; and produces high-quality policy papers, briefs, and political dynamics analyses that inform programming, advocacy, and legal or policy interventions. Her approach prioritises locally grounded work that is culturally relevant, conflict-sensitive, and responsive to complex political realities.

Anchored in the WPS agenda, Doris has particular experience supporting initiatives that integrate women’s voices into peace and security processes, accountability efforts, and transitional justice pathways. She also conducts inclusive dialogue and consultation processes on the ground, helping partners translate community priorities into actionable recommendations and policy positions.

Her MA thesis examined the gendered consequences of international sanctions on Syrian women, drawing on feminist political economy and intersectional analysis to connect global power structures with lived realities. She also holds a BA in Business Administration from Bethlehem University. Doris has contributed as a speaker in high-level advocacy spaces, including the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), and delivers trainings, workshops, and research outputs in both Arabic and English. Based in Brussels, she connects local realities with global policy arenas to advance meaningful, transformative change.

Dr. Rusudan Beriashvili

Dr. Beriashvili has worked in the field of Forensic Medicine since 1996. She graduated from Tbilisi State Medical University and received a PhD in Forensic Medicine in 2003. Since 2003 she has been an Associate Professor of Forensic Medicine. In 2009-2011 Dr. Beriashvili was the Head of Forensic Biology and the Head of Forensic Medicine at the National Forensics Bureau of Georgia. 

Since 2004 Dr. Beriashvili has been actively involved in the Istanbul Protocol Implementation Project in Georgia. She participated as an International Trainer in Prevention and Documentation of Torture in several professional trainings in Georgia, Egypt, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Jordan, Iraq, Armenia, Thailand, Ukraine. Dr. Rusudan Beriashvili is a member of the International Forensic Experts Group of IRCT. 

Dr. Rusudan Beriashvili is the Secretary General of Georgian Forensic Medical Association, a member of Forensic Science Society (FSS, UK), a member of DNA Working Group of European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (DNAWG ENFSI), a member of European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG), a member of International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners (IAC&ME), a member of International Academy of Legal Medicine (IALM).

Dr. Triveni DeFries

Triveni DeFries, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Department (UCSF) of Medicine. She is a physician who is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine. She completed medical school, residency and fellowship training at UCSF. She practices primary care and addiction medicine at San Francisco General Hospital.

She co-directs the UCSF Human Rights Clinic, where she performs forensic medical evaluations for people seeking asylum in the United States and teaches learners and clinicians. She serves as the Director of Education & Training for the UCSF Human Rights Initiative. She co-founded the Asylum Medicine Training Initiative and has collaborated with Physicians for Human Rights, Synergy, and other experts to increase the capacity of clinicians to perform documentation of human rights abuses using trauma-informed care and the Istanbul Protocol. Her special interests are in immigrant health, human rights, and addiction medicine.

Ajna Jusić

Ajna Jusić is a Bosnian human rights advocate whose work centers on justice, equality, and the rights of marginalized communities — especially children born of war and survivors of sexual violence. As President of the Forgotten Children of War Association, she has led national and international advocacy for recognition and reparations. Ajna is also a member of the Survivor Expert Roster for the Stigma Toolkit for Justice.

With a background in psychology and a passion for transformative storytelling, she bridges activism, academia, and art to challenge stigma and drive systemic change. Her efforts have earned her multiple international awards for courage, peacebuilding, and human rights leadership.

Dr. Coleen Kivlahan

Dr. Coleen Kivlahan is a senior physician executive leader for primary care services at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is engaged in U.S. health policy, redesigning care, and public health. Dr. Kivlahan is a family physician with clinical experience in primary and complex care and has worked in health care at the local, state, national, and international levels.

Her special interest is health and human rights, and she has been a skilled trainer in the scientific documentation of human rights violations for the past twenty years. At UCSF, she is the lead faculty member for a new medical student rotation on immigrant health and forensic evaluations of torture, she leads the forensic evaluation clinic with UCSF faculty and students, and is a Chairperson of the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative.

Dr. Kivlahan worked for five years in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Physicians for Human Rights, followed by more than ten years training doctors during the Syrian conflict with Synergy for Justice. She has also worked in Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and Belgium on torture and ill-treatment medical consequences. She has authored multiple articles and book chapters on this subject. 

Morgane Landel

Morgane has 20 years of experience working in domestic and international criminal jurisdictions and on rule of law and access to justice, with a special focus on gender, sexual, and gender-based violence, and domestic violence.  

Morgane practiced domestic and international criminal law for 10 years. She started as a criminal defense lawyer in London, representing legal aid clients. She then joined various international prosecution teams as an investigator, legal officer, and trial attorney. She worked on prosecuting crimes against humanity, genocide, terrorism, and organized crime in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Lebanon. At the same time, Morgane volunteered with various organizations to support the rule of law in Colombia and Syria. She provided training and expert support to document human rights violations. 

Since 2013, Morgane has focused on working with survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in Asia and the Pacific. She designed and managed projects on increasing women survivors' access to justice. In order to support holistic solutions, she provided technical assistance on judicial strengthening, policy and legal reform, access to support services for survivors, capacity building of all justice service providers and awareness raising for survivors. 

Oleksandr Maksymenko

Oleksandr Maksymenko worked as an analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

After February 24, 2022, he spent six months under occupation, where he continued working and endured captivity and torture.

He has several decades of experience in human rights work, in trade unions and civil society organisations, and he is also a journalist.

After being released from captivity, he managed to return to the government-controlled territory of Ukraine. He began volunteering to support Ukrainian soldiers at the front and became a co-founder of a charitable organisation. He also resumed his journalistic activities.

Oleksandr Maksymenko joined the Network of Ukrainian men who survived captivity and torture, “Alumni.” Within the organisation, he leads the international direction, informing the international community about the use of torture and its consequences in Ukraine, advocating for fair compensation and reparations for victims, and participating in campaigns aimed at eradicating torture worldwide.

As an expert on victims’ rights, he participates in various conferences and seminars for representatives of law enforcement agencies, local authorities, and non-governmental organisations, including international ones.

Oleksandr participated as a speaker at events of the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court in The Hague in December 2025.

He has also collaborated with the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI), providing expertise on victim-centred approaches to access to justice and recovery pathways for victims, contributing to the development of the Synergy for Justice anti-stigmatisation assessment toolkit for criminal justice systems - Guidance on Implementing the MHPSS Principles of the Murad Code.

Dima Moussa

Dima Moussa is a US-licensed lawyer with over 15 years of experience as a legal professional. She started focusing on Syria in 2011 and has worked as a consultant with several international and Syrian human rights, non-governmental, and political organisations. She has extensive experience working on Syrian justice programs, including conducting assessments of local justice actors and institutions, legal frameworks, and law enforcement, with additional focus on constitutional, human rights, and gender issues. Ms. Moussa’s expertise also includes project management, organisational development, and capacity building. She is fluent in Arabic and English.

Judge Keith Raynor

Judge Keith Raynor is a Circuit Judge at Leicester Crown Court and specialises in domestic and international criminal law.

In England he presides over trials in cases including attempted murder, sexual offences, gang and serious organised crime, drugs, fraud, money laundering and firearms offences.

He has served in posts in international criminal law. He is the former Vice President of The Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. He previously served as an international prosecutor at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia from 2012 to 2014, trying former senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. He also investigated war crimes in Iraq with the Iraq Historic Allegations Prosecution Team (IHAPT) .

From 2004 to 2015 he worked as a criminal law barrister, including defending and prosecuting cases in the UK and undertaking defence work at military courts.

He is on The Advisory Council to Guernica 37 Chambers in London and Madrid, and on The Advisory Council of The International Legal Assistance Consortium (ILAC) in Stockholm, and deployed in 2016 with a team of experts to undertake a study of the justice system in Syria.

He is called on regularly to deliver practical training in domestic and international criminal law, principally in designing and delivering mock criminal law trials for prosecution and defence advocates and judges. Recent work has concentrated on assisting UNODC and CEELI with remote video court hearings during the coronavirus pandemic and judicial case management and international criminal law training with mock trials in Beirut and Baghdad and wildlife prosecutions in Tanzania, and marine piracy cases in Somalia/The Seychelles.

Dr. Ricardo Restrepo-Guzman

Dr. Restrepo-Guzman is a psychiatrist interested in the field of cultural psychiatry and human rights, and he currently manages a substance abuse and mental health program that he developed at the Long Beach VA Hospital. Ricardo holds an academic position as Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California (Irvine and Riverside) School of Medicine and most recently at the Charles Drew University, Los Angeles.

He is actively involved in issues related to transcultural psychiatry and addictions. He has worked with immigrant populations in the United States for over 20 years. As a volunteer psychiatric expert, he has participated in projects in the United States, Latin America and the Middle East. He has been a United Nations Consultant since 2005 and has participated actively in the implementation in Mexico and in Colombia of the Manual on Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, also known as the Istanbul Protocol.

He is a member of Synergy for Justice and actively involved in training and mentoring Middle Eastern doctors to document torture and sexual violence for justice processes. Dr. Restrepo has written chapters on addiction and for human rights textbooks. He is the co-author of textbooks on substance use disorder as well as women’s health and addiction, and he cooperated with the Translation of DSM-5 to Spanish. He is board re-certified in Psychiatry and Addiction Psychiatry and a professional musician.

Dr. Restrepo completed medical school at the Instituto de Ciencias de la Salud in Medellín, Colombia. In 2003, he completed his residency training in Psychiatry at Boston University Medical Center, and then obtained a fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry from the same institution. In 2008, he received a Master’s degree in Global Public Health from New York University. He is board certified in Psychiatry and Addiction Psychiatry.

Dr. Rosado is an American Board of Pediatrics board-certified child abuse pediatrician with over 20 years of experience as a consultant in the areas of child abuse and over 10 years of experience in the documentation of ill-treatment to children in asylum and refugee cases.

Dr. Rosado graduated from Universidad La Salle School of Medicine in Mexico City, Mexico. In 2000, he completed a residency in Pediatrics at Sinai Children’s Hospital in Chicago and served as its Chief Resident. He became Board Certified in General Pediatrics in 2001 and in Child Abuse Pediatrics in 2009. Dr. Rosado has been working in the field of child abuse for over 20 years.

In 2000, Dr. Rosado joined the Child Protective Services Team at Sinai Children’s Hospital and served as its Medical Director from 2002 to 2005. In 2004, he joined the Division of Child Protective Services at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County and the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center, where he started doing medical evaluations for children seeking asylum in the United States. In 2010, he worked as a Consultant Pediatrician for the Child Protection Team at Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. In 2013, Dr. Rosado started working with the Division of Child Abuse Pediatrics at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where he has served as its Interim Division Head since 2020.

At Lurie Children’s Hospital, Dr. Rosado co-founded the Forensic Assessment for Immigration Relief (FAIR) Clinic. The FAIR Clinic is a staff-run clinic dedicated to providing forensic medical and psychological evaluations to child and adolescent survivors seeking asylum in the United States. Staffed by child psychologists and a child abuse pediatrician, the FAIR Clinic is the only one of its kind in Illinois.

Dr. Rosado serves as a member of the Midwest Human Rights Coalition’s (MHRC) Steering Committee of the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Council on Child Abuse and Neglect of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a Member-At-Large of the Executive Committee of The Ray E. Helfer Society. Dr. Rosado has trained many medical providers, law enforcement personnel, and social workers in the fields of child abuse and the documentation of ill-treatment of children seeking asylum in the United States. In November 2022, Dr. Rosado was retained as a consultant and trainer for Synergy for Justice to conduct training on forensic medical evaluations for child survivors of torture and sexual violence for Syrian physicians. Dr. Rosado is bilingual and bicultural in Spanish and English.

Dr. Dina al Shafie

Dr. Al Shafie has been working with asylum seekers and refugees who suffer from torture, sexual violence, and other ill treatments for almost 20 years. Her work was giving therapy and medication to start with, and forming group therapies, and from 2004 she started training on mental health issues that refugees can face due to war and displacement.

Dr. Al Shafie is a fluent Arabic and English speaker and comes from Egypt and the UK. She was the first one to manage a psychosocial centre in a legal international NGO that dealt with legal issues in Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA).

Dr. Al Shafie is an expert in training doctors, lawyers, and judges on the Istanbul Protocol and other related fields. Dr. Al Shafie trained in UNHCR, UNODC, Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA), MSF, Physicians for Human Rights, Synergy for Justice, Amideast, doctors from Egyptian governorates, and other NGOs.

 She worked as the staff psychiatrist for Médecins Sans Frontières for seven years. Some of the staff were refugees, they themselves had suffered from psychological issues due to displacement, loss of family members due to war, conflict, and torture. 

She is also an expert witness in the MENA region, where she writes expert witness reports to legal firms all around the world, and is a member of the Justice Rapid Response roster. She has dealt with children who have been subjected to domestic violence, depression, and other psychological issues.

For the past four years, Dr. Al Shafie has trained Iraqi and Syrian doctors, lawyers, and judges on victim survivors, how to obtain psychological evidence of torture and sexual violence, mentoring moot courts, and investigating crimes against humanity and war crimes. 

Dr. Al Shafie is the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Maadi British International School in Cairo, Egypt. It is recognised amongst the most prestigious British Curriculum international schools in Egypt, North Africa, and the Middle East. It received the Penta International Awards 2021. 

Dr. Al Shafie has a Master’s degree in Cultural Heritage studies from University College London. 

Venesa Sulimani

Vanesa Sulimani is a survivor advocate and public speaker specialising in intergenerational trauma, transitional justice, and child-focused recovery. As the first child in Kosovo to speak publicly about the intergenerational impact of conflict-related sexual violence, she has dedicated her work to breaking stigma and creating spaces for healing and understanding.

For over 15 years, she has navigated her own journey through mental, physical, and emotional recovery, transforming that experience into purpose and advocacy. Her work has taken her from Kosovo to international platforms such as the International Criminal Court, the PSVI Conference, KRCT, and the Brave Movement, where she shares survivor-informed perspectives to inspire systemic and social change. Vanesa is also a member of Synergy's Survivor Expert Roster.

Her mission is to ensure that future generations of children affected by sexual violence are no longer silenced or invisible, but recognised, supported, and heard so they can reclaim their futures.

Some years ago, Nadine Tunasi fled the war in her country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, to seek asylum in the UK, where she has become an advocate and a writer, raising awareness of torture, sexual violence, and other human rights issues. She began volunteering at the African Swahiliphone Refugee Project, helping asylum seekers through translation, referrals to lawyers, and helping to organise health promotion events in the community, such as HIV awareness-raising. She has also worked in the office of MP Jeremy Corbyn, helping constituents to resolve issues related to asylum and housing.

Nadine also joined the Survivors Speak Out Network (SSO) to advocate against the use of torture worldwide, educate the public about its effects, and campaign for its eradication. Ms. Tunasi has spoken at different events organised by Amnesty International and various universities, including the Stand Speak Rise Up against Sexual Violence conference in Luxembourg, and she has co-facilitated workshops (including for the UK Foreign Office’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative) on issues that survivors of sexual violence face, both in the UK and around the world.

Recently, Nadine worked with the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI), providing expertise on survivor-based approaches for the drafting of the Murad Code. She also provided key expertise on access to justice and pathways for survivors for Synergy’s development of an anti-stigma assessment toolkit for criminal justice systems.

Nadine Tunsai is currently working for Freedom from Torture, coordinating SSO events and leading its policy for survivor inputs and contributions. She is also a member of One Strong Voice, the first UK network coalition of lived experience of the immigration and asylum system.

Philomène is a senior lecturer in the School of Nursing and Allied Health at Liverpool John Moores University. She is project lead for their Resource Hub for professionals who support asylum seekers, refugees and migrant populations, and also leads the Humanitarian Champions programme for this group. Philomène has been a registered mental health nurse since 2006, holds an MSc in Public Health (International Development), and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. through published work. She has experience working in primary care and public health, and in particular with programmes to increase life expectancy and promote health and well-being for people seeking asylum, refugees, and other migrants.