Advisory Board

WHRIN’s advisory board is made up of a number of well- respected and experienced international practitioners from the fields of academia, activism, law, child protection and social work. In addition to providing regular advice to support the management and strategy of WHRIN, members of WHRIN’s advisory board also commit to providing informal and free advice to any members of the WHRIN network.

Prof. Jean La Fontaine trained in Cambridge and taught at the LSE where she is Professor Emeritus. She has conducted research in Africa and the UK and has written extensively on ritual (especially initiation rituals), gender and kinship, witchcraft and satanism, child abuse and incest. Jean’s most recent book is “The Devil’s Children – From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft: New Allegations that affect Children”. An interesting interview with her can be found here.

Kirsty Brimelow QC  is an internationally renowned and respected human rights lawyer, working at the leading chambers – Doughty Street – in London.  Kirsty specialises in international human rights, criminal law, public international, constitutional and international criminal law. She is instructed in the most serious, complex and prominent cases nationally and internationally. She has worked on the issues WHRIN is focused on for over 10 years now, and has assisted with a number of legal cases, trained lawyers and judges in Nigeria, and advocated for survivors of abuse. More recently, she chaired the UN Workshop on Witchcraft and Human Rights in Geneva and regularly contributes here expertise on a pro-bono basis to the UN working group on harmful practices related to manifestation of witchcraft belief (HPW).

James Ibor is a Nigerian barrister and fearless human rights defender. Through the work of the NGO he founded – Basic Rights Counsel – James has been instrumental in the fight against witchcraft accusations and those who profit from perpetuating such beliefs. He has been widely consulted on the issue by government, UN agencies and international development agencies and is recognised as a leading legal expert on the issue in Africa.