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, her research focuses on rule of law approaches in countering-terrorism.

Her main areas of interest are international (criminal) law 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 adopting effective prosecutorial strategies, collecting information from the conflict zone and sentencing. Tanya also conducts research on the use of administrative measures, deprivation of nationality and the implications of terrorist designation. In addition she critically looks at the need to develop, expand and the use of counter-terrorism strategies, laws and policies. She contributes regularly to national and international media in her field of expertise.

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 including the role of female returnees. In 2024 Tanya has co-edited the book with ICCT Press: Female Jihadis Facing Justice: Comparing Approaches in Europe.

More recent interests include transnational repression, on-line hate speech and freedom of expression and how to deal with radicalized youth offenders.

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 use of different forms of evidence for the prosecution of terrorist suspects, the Glion Recommendations on the use of administrative measures in a CT-context, and the Interlinkages Memorandum on the nexus between terrorism and core International crimes including sexual and gender-based violence crimes.

At ICCT, Tanya is responsible for the development of two flag ship projects, the Foreign Terrorist Fighters Knowledge Hub and the Interlinkages Database. She is leading several projects including the Prosecuting for Linkages between Terrorism and Core International Crimes in Indonesia, Prosecution, Rehabilitation, Reintegration (PRR) and Case Management in Iraq and Feasibility Study On The Development Of An Assessment Framework For Terrorist And Borderline Content Online.