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Our staff and trustees

Staff

To contact individual staff members, replace [at] with @.

Tony Bunyan (Director Emeritus)

Tony is an investigative journalist and writer specialising in justice and home affairs, civil liberties, EU state-building and freedom of information. He was Director of Statewatch 1990-2010 and edited Statewatch News (1999-2010). He is the author of The Political Police in Britain (1977), Secrecy and Openness in the European Union (1999) and The Shape of Things to Come (2009) and edited The War on Freedom and Democracy (2005). He is a Member of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations and a Lifetime Member of the National Union of Journalists  The position of Director Emeritus in Statewatch is a life-time appointment - Tony continues to be a member of the Statewatch team.

• Email: tony [at] statewatch.org

Chris Jones (Executive Director)

Chris has been working for Statewatch since 2010 and in September 2020 was appointed as Executive Director. He specialises in issues relating to policing, migration, privacy and data protection and security technologies.

• Email: chris [at] statewatch.org
• @earsinfingers

Romain Lanneau (Consultant Researcher)

Romain Lanneau is a legal researcher based in Amsterdam, publishing on the topics of migration, asylum, and the use of new technologies for public policies. In 2021, he was selected as a Bucerius Start Up PhD Fellow for a one-year project on the theme of 'Beyond Borders'. He is a recent graduate of a research LLM on International Migration and Refugee Law from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. In the past, he worked for several NGOs, including the largest research network on migration and refugee law in Europe, the Odysseus Academic Network.

• Email: romain [at] statewatch.org
• @romainlanneau

Yasha Maccanico (Researcher)

Yasha has worked for Statewatch since 1998, providing news coverage, analysis and translations to link EU policies to events on the ground in the justice and home affairs field in several member states (UK, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and Portugal). He has extensive public speaking experience in civil society and academic contexts and in 2019 completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in Policy Studies on the topic of 'European Immigration Policies as a Problem: State Power and Authoritarianism'.

• Email: yasha [at] statewatch.org
• @yashamac1

Rahmat Tavakkoli (Finance & Administration Worker)

Rahmat joined Statewatch in September 2021 to take care of our financial and administrative procedures, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and contribute to the smooth running of the office and the organization.

• Email admin [at] statewatch.org

Trustees

Gabriel Almeida

Gabriel Almeida works as a Senior Human Rights Officer at ENNHRI, the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions. He coordinates ENNHRI's work on asylum and migration, which has focused on the need for independent and effective human rights monitoring and stronger human rights accountability at borders. He also leads ENNHRI's activities to support European NHRIs with their international accreditation, advises on the establishment of new institutions, and supports NHRIs that may be under attack. Alongside his colleagues, Gabriel supports the ENNHRI Board with the organisational development and strategic positioning of ENNHRI.

Prior to joining ENNHRI, Gabriel worked as a Junior Legal Officer at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) and as a Research Assistant for the Odysseus Network. Gabriel graduated cum laude in International and European law (human rights track) from Tilburg University after completing a bachelor's degree in International Relations at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche is Professor of Law at the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, honorarium member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and fellow of the Institut Convergence Migrations. Her researches focus on the exigencies of the rule of law and their limitations in cases of exceptions: the situations of serious crises which allow the concentration of powers and restriction of rights (e.g. the use of the state of emergency), and the areas of legal confinement which are conducive to abuses of power and rights infringements (e.g. camps and centres where migrants and refugees are detained). She is member of the editorial board of various reviews and is involved in numerous academics networks regarding human rights law. You can find more information about her activities and publications on her personal webpage.

Laure Baudrihaye-Gérard

Laure is a lawyer based in Brussels, where she works on EU and Belgian criminal justice policy. She qualified as a solicitor in London, specialised in EU law and worked in private practice in both London and Brussels before studying criminology. After participating in several academic research projects, Laure joined Fair Trials, a criminal justice watchdog, in 2018. As Legal Director for Europe, she led on EU advocacy, strategic litigation in European courts and the coordination of a European-wide network of criminal defence lawyers, civil society and academic organisations. She has also been working as a prison monitor since 2019 in a large pre-trial detention prison in Brussels, and since 2020 heads up the appeals committee that adjudicates on complaints from detained people against the prison administration.

Jonathan Bloch

Jonathan Bloch studied law at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. He was politically involved in South Africa in the worker and student movement and remains active in human rights circles in the UK. From 2002 until 2014 he chaired the Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust, one of the largest scholarship awarding organisations in South Africa. He was a councillor in the London Borough of Haringey 2002-14. He has co-authored several books on intelligence. He owns and runs a worldwide financial information business across four continents.

Victoria Canning

Victoria Canning is senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. She has spent over a decade working on the rights of women seeking asylum, specifically on support for survivors of sexual violence and torture with NGOs and migrant rights organisations. She recently completed an ESRC Research Leaders Fellowship focussing on harmful practice in asylum systems in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and the gendered implications thereof. Vicky has experience researching in immigration detention in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Denmark’s main deportation centre. She is currently embarking on a study of torture case file datasets with the Danish Institute Against Torture which aims to create a basis from which to better identify and thus respond to sexual torture and sexualised torturous violence with refugee survivors of torture more broadly.

Nadine Finch

Nadine was a member of the Statewatch contributors group for a number of years and also previously a trustee. She was a human rights barrister between 1992 and 2015 and an Upper Tribunal Judge from 2015 to 2020. She is now an Honorary Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Bristol and an Associate at Child Circle, a children's rights NGO based in Brussels.

Lilana Keith

Lilana Keith is PICUM’s Senior Advocacy Officer on Labour Rights and Labour migration. PICUM - the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, is a network of more than 165 organisations in 35 countries, mostly in Europe, working for human rights and social justice for undocumented migrants.

Lilana joined PICUM in 2011 and has had various roles, including leading PICUM’s work to advance the rights and inclusion of undocumented children, young people and families for many years. She has been involved in work to advance migrants’ rights since 2009, including through community development and funding. She has an academic background in international and European migration law and policy and anthropology.