Dr Cristiano d’Orsi is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Human Rights. His research focuses on the plight and legal position of what he calls ‘people on the move’ in Africa – migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.
His first encounter with migrants from Africa was when he was still at university in Italy and started interning for a small NGO in his home town, Perugia. His internship began in the early 2000s when there was an influx of asylum-seekers from Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola. Faced with this situation, he and his colleagues realised that they did not know what the legal position of these forced migrants was. This triggered his interest in the area of public international law.
Dr d’Orsi’s paper on the legal protection of refugees in Africa, published in the ZaöeRV of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, opened the door for him to become known among refugee law academics. Apart from Italian, which is his mother tongue, he speaks French fluently. This enabled him to publish articles in French on the conflict in Casamance, Senegal, focusing on the legal situation of the Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques (Democratic Forces Movement), and on International Migration through The Hague Academy of International Law. He has also been invited to teach in French at the International Relations Institute of Cameroon (IRIC) at the University of Yaoundé.
His monograph, entitled Asylum-Seeker and Refugee Protection in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Peregrination of a Persecuted Human Being in Search of a Safe Haven, was published in August 2015 by Routledge. He says it is not often acknowledged that the great majority of African refugee movement happens within Africa rather than from Africa to the West. His book examines the characteristics and challenges of the refugee situation in sub-Saharan Africa, offering a new and critical vision about the plight of asylum-seekers and refugees in Africa.
