Mr. Ryszard Cholewinski is the Senior Migration Specialist in the ILO’s Regional Office for Arab States in Beirut. Between September 2010 and July 2017, he was a Migration Policy Specialist in the Labour Migration Branch in Geneva. His current responsibilities include work on policy, research, training and technical cooperation activities in the Arab States region, in collaboration with other units in ILO Headquarters, field offices and ILO’s tripartite constituents, with a view to advancing ILO’s fair migration agenda.

He is a lawyer by training with 13 years of previous experience in an academic setting. He has written widely on the human rights of migrants, labour migration, and various aspects of European Union law and policy relating to migration. In particular, he is the author of Migrant Workers in International Human Rights Law: Their Protection in Countries of Employment (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997) and two publications for the Council of Europe The Legal Status of Migrants Admitted for Employment (2004), and Irregular Migrants: Access to Minimum Social Rights (2005).

Most recently, he was the lead author of Addressing governance challenges in a changing labour migration landscape, the report for the general discussion on labour migration at the 106th Session of the International Labour Conference in June 2017. He was also one of the principal authors of the Handbook for Parliamentarians on Migration, human rights and governance (October 2015), a joint publication of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the ILO and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Prior to joining the ILO, he was a Senior Migration Policy and Research Specialist in the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva and Reader in Law at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. While at IOM, he was co-editor-in-chief of World Migration 2008: Managing Labour Mobility in the Evolving Global Economy and co-authored two editions of the Handbook on Establishing Effective Labour Migration Policies in Countries of Origin and Destination (2006, 2007), a joint publication of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), IOM and ILO.

He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Ottawa, a Master in Laws degree from the University of Saskatchewan, and a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Leicester.

Work areas: International labour migration; Human and labour rights of migrants; EU law and policy on migration; irregular migration.

Working languages: English, Polish, French (UN proficiency).