Cessation of refugee status in the Nordic region: developments & dilemmas

Join us for a webinar to discuss with UNHCR and researchers with the TemPro project developments and dynamics of cessation practice in Northern Europe. This is a joint collaboration between CMI’s TemPro project and the UNHCR Nordic and Baltic Countries regional office.

Moderator: Jessica Schultz (Senior Researcher CMI) and Olivia Mocanasu, Legal Officer/Judicial Engagement Coordinator, UNHCR. For further information, feel free to contact: jessica.schultz@cmi.no

Gisela Thater is Senior Legal Officer for the Nordic countries at UNHCR’s Representation for the Nordic and Baltic Countries.  She holds a law degree from the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund, Sweden. She has worked for UNHCR for many years in various protection capacities with experience from the Middle East, Central Asia, South East Asia and the East and Horn of Africa.

Jessica Leigh Schultz is Senior Researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute as well as a post-doc at the University of Bergen, Faculty of Law. She has written extensively on the ‘internal protection alternative’ in refugee law, and has dipped into the law of cessation in recent publications, including An End to Asylum? Temporary Protection and the Erosion of Refugee Status.

Dr Nikolas Feith Tan is a researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, where he works on refugee and asylum law. He is convenor of Protecting human rights, refugees and displaced persons in international law for the University of London’s MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies. Nikolas has also acted as legal consultant for UNHCR, Danish Refugee Council and Amnesty International. He has an article on the Danish ‘paradigm shift’ and the law of cessation forthcoming in the Nordic Journal of International Law.

Peter Varga is Legal Officer and Focal Point for Sweden at UNHCR Representation for the Nordic and Baltic Countries. He has previously worked at a private law firm and the Swedish Refugee Law Center. He has litigated several cases before the Swedish Migration Court of Appeal, the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Treaty Bodies.

Jens Vedsted-Hansen is professor at Aarhus University where he works within human rights law and asylum and immigration law. He was involved in the Nordic comparative studies on temporary protection of refugees from 1995 to 1998 and contributed to the recent publication Temporary asylum and cessation of refugee status in Scandinavia. Policies, practices and dilemmas, EMN Norway Occasional Papers 2020 (with Jan-Paul Brekke and Rebecca Thorburn Stern). In addition to being a core researcher on the TemPro project, he is also involved in the Horizon 2020 project ASILE. 

Maria O'Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Monash University and a member of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. Her teaching and research interests are public law, human rights and refugee law. Maria is the author of a number of international and national publications on the subjects of human rights and refugee law. Her latest book is 'Refugee Law and Durability of Protection: Temporary Residence and Cessation of Status', published by Routledge in 2019.

Olivia Mocanasu is Legal Officer and Focal Point for Norway at UNHCR’s Representation for the Nordic and Baltic Countries. In her quality as Judicial Engagement Coordinator she is involved in litigation cases before domestic courts in the region and the European Court of Human Rights.  Further, she has extensive experience from the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration where she served as Human Rights Coordinator.