Tanya Mehra

Tanya Mehra LL.M is a Senior Research Fellow and Programme Lead (Rule of Law Responses to Terrorism) at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. With a background in international law, Tanya is involved in conducting evidence-based research, providing policy advice, advising governments on a rule of a law approach in countering terrorism. Previously, she worked at the T.M.C. Asser Instituut where she was engaged in capacity building projects and developing training programmes.  

Tanya’s main areas of interest are international (criminal) law and rule of law approaches in countering terrorism, with a focus on bringing alleged terrorists to justice for the full range of crimes they have committed, in full compliance with human rights. This includes researching prosecutorial strategies, collecting information from the conflict zone and the use of administrative measures in a counter-terrorism context. In addition to accountability for terrorist offences, Tanya also looks into the accountability of States and international organizations for developing and implementing rule of law compliant counter-terrorism strategies, laws and policies.

Other areas of expertise include the repatriation and prosecution, where applicable, of foreign ‘terrorist’ fighters. Her work looks into challenges and opportunities in holding foreign fighters accountable in different jurisdictions, the role of female returnees and a child-rights approach to child returnees. Tanya has published on a wide range of topic through a rule of law lens.

She works closely with policy makers, judges, prosecutors and other actors of the criminal justice sector as well as international organisations such as UN CTED, GCTF and NATO where she has lead the development of several good practices documents. She worked as a senior consultant to the UN CTED on developing global guidelines to facilitate the collection of information and evidence by military within a rule-of-law framework and under auspices of – GCTF Criminal Justice and Rule of Law  (CJ-ROL) Working Group Co-Chairs – Nigeria and Switzerland – responsible for developing the Abuja Recommendations on the Collection, Use and Sharing of Evidence for Purposes of Criminal Prosecution of Terrorist Suspects and on the Glion Recommendations on a Rule of Law based Use of Administrative Measures in a CT context and the Memorandum on Criminal Justice Approaches to the Linkages between Terrorism and Core International Crimes, Sexual and Gender-based Violence Crimes, Human Trafficking, Migrant Smuggling, Slavery, and Crimes against Children. 

At ICCT, Tanya is leading several projects including the foreign terrorist fighters knowledge hub, a research project exploring the criminal justice responses to the linkages between terrorism and international crimes, developing training and policy advice for Indonesia and a comparative research project on the prosecution, rehabilitation and reintegration of female returnees and violent extremist offenders in four countries.