On this page, you will find:

To find organisations working for LGBTQI+ rights, visit our Venezuela LGBTQI+ Resources page.
To find organisations providing legal or other types of assistance to refugees in Venezuela, visit our Venezuela Legal Assistance page

COI Experts

Email: av48@nyu.edu

Dr Alejandro Velasco, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at New York University.  His research focuses on social movements, urban studies, democracy, and human rights, and has won support from the Ford and Mellon Foundations, the American Historical Association, and the Social Science Research Council, among others.  Born and raised in Venezuela, he was a UCV-CENDES research fellow in 2004-2005. Velasco’s book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Protest and the Making of Modern Venezuela (California, 2015) won the Coronil Award for Best Book presented by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association. He is the Executive Editor of NACLA Report on the Americas, a quarterly magazine covering Latin America and the US. His commentary and analysis on Venezuela and the region have appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, NPR, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg, History News Network, and other media outlets in the US and abroad.

Email:hellindc@webster.edu

Dr Daniël Hellinger, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations. After earning a PhD from Rutgers University and a short stint elsewhere, he joined the Webster University faculty in 1979. Dr Hellinger is an expert in Latin America. His most recent books are, Comparative Politics of Latin America: Democracy at Last? (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2021), Global Security Watch: Venezuela (Praeger 2012), and Bolivarian Democracy in Venezuela: Participation, Politics and Culture (contributor, and co-editor with David Smilde, Duke University, 2011). Dr Hellinger has been a Senior Research Scholar at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, lectured at the Central University of Venezuela and the Shanghai Institute for Finance and Economics, and has been a Fulbright scholar at the Universidad Católica in Valparaíso, Chile, and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. He is a participating editor for Latin American Perspectives and was the founding Chair of the Executive Board for the Center for Democracy in the Americas in Washington D.C. He has provided over 60 export opinions supporting asylum petitions in the U.S., mostly about Venezuela.

Email: adrianjuris@gmail.com

Dr Tamara Adrián Hernandez is a practising lawyer and Professor of Law at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Universidad Metropolitana. She is a well-known LGBTI activist and a member of numerous LGBTI organisations. Currently, she acts as a representative of the Venezuelan LGBTI network and as the national coordinator of the Venezuelan Committee for Vulnerable Groups and Sexual Diversity. Furthermore, she is the Chair of IDAHO-T and the World Trans Secretary of ILGA. Her attempts to have her gender and name legally recognized have been unsuccessful so far.

COI Resources

Document link

UNHCR Eligibility Guidelines offer a legal interpretation of the refugee criteria in respect of specific profiles on the basis of social, economic, security, human rights, and humanitarian conditions in the country/territory of origin concerned. 

Venezuela Legal Assistance

Find organisations offering legal and other types of assistance to refugees in Venezuela.

Venezuela LGBTQI+ Resources

Find organisations working for refugee LGBTQI+ rights in Venezuela.

We are always looking to expand the resources on our platform. If you know about relevant experts, or you are aware of organisations and/or resources to include in our directories, please get in touch.

Last updated May 2023