Staff

Working Languages
Arabic, English, French and Spanish

Contact details:
Tel: +41 22 799 71 48
Fax: +41 22 799 88 36
E-mail: awad@ilo.org

Mr. brahim Awad has been serving as the Director of the International Migration Programme, International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva, since July 2005. Previously, he was the Director of the ILO Subregional Office for North Africa based in Cairo. He had worked with the International Migration programme in the 1990s and early in that decade was in charge of an ILO-UNDP project on labour migration policies in Arab States.

Before joining the ILO, Mr. Awad held senior positions in several regional and United Nations organizations in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He also served as the Secretary of the Commission, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) based in Beirut.

He taught at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Political Science Department for some years. He has carried out wide-ranging research and published extensively on international labour migration, political economy, international relations, international organization, development, employment, human and labour rights and regional integration.

A graduate of the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, University of Cairo, he obtained his Doctorate in Political Science from the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Work Areas: Globalization and international labour migration; Migration and development; migration policies and programmes; regional integration and migration; Labour migration issues in the Middle East, Africa and the Mediterranean basin.

Working Language
English

Contact details:
Tel: +41 22 799 64 97
Fax: +41 22 799 88 36
E-mail: wickramasekara@ilo.org

Mr. Piyasiri Wickramasekara, Senior Migration Specialist (Officer in Charge from January to June 2005), joined the ILO in 1985 as a senior development economist of the Asian Regional Team for Employment Promotion (ILO-ARTEP) and served in New Delhi from 1986 to 1993. From 1994, he functioned as a senior specialist in labour market policies in the ILO's East Asia Multidisciplinary Advisory Team and moved to the International Migration Programme, Geneva, in January 2001. Before joining the ILO, he served as a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and as senior researcher in the Agrarian Research and Training Institute and the People's Bank of Sri Lanka. He graduated from the University of Sri Lanka, Peradeniya, and obtained his Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Cambridge, UK. He has written widely on migration trends and issues in Asia, migration of skilled labour, remittances, rights of migrant workers and migration statistics.

Work areas: Globalization and Migration; Migration and development; Skilled migration and the brain drain; Asian labour migration; Irregular migration; Migration statistics including the ILM Database.

Working Languages
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese

Contact details:
Tel: +41 22 799 80 91
Fax: +41 22 799 88 36
E-mail: taran@ilo.org

Mr. Patrick Taran is Senior Migration Specialist at the ILO International Migration Programme. He has 30 years of professional experience in the fields of migration, refugees and integration work, at local, national and global levels. Prior to joining the ILO in 2000, he held posts as Secretary for Migration at the World Council of Churches, Program Officer for the joint UN inter-agency International Migration Policy Program, and Director of Migrants Rights International (MRI). He convened the Steering Committee for the Global Campaign for ratification of the International Convention on migrants' rights in 1998 and served as its coordinator until 2002.

Previous to 1990, he directed local and national refugee and immigration programs in the USA. He has written extensively on topics of human rights of migrants, migration and globalization, and discrimination and integration issues. His university degree from State University of New York/Friends World College combined majors in Latin America Studies and Social Services.

Work areas: Discrimination against/Integration of migrant and immigrant workers; Human Rights of Migrants, Migration and Globalization, Regional Integration and Migration. Geographic focus: Europe; CIS countries, including Russian Federation, Caucasus and Central Asia.

Working Languages
English, French, Spanish, and basic knowledge of Italian

Contact details:
Tel: +41 22 799 78 54
Fax: +41 22 799 88 36
E-mail: mfontes@ilo.org

Ms. Gloria Moreno Fontes Chammartin has worked for the ILO Headquarters since 1993. In November 1997, she joined ILO's International Labour Migration Programme and has the responsibility for developing and managing research and technical cooperation in the fields of migrant women domestic workers, productive use of remittances, trafficking in migrant women and gender in migration. Her work includes research and activities on abusive and exploitative conditions of migrant workers. She is also guiding the effort to mainstream gender throughout MIGRANT's work. Previously, she worked for four years in the Active Labour Market Policies Branch of the Employment Department of the ILO on issues of wages, employment status flexibility, maquiladoras and trade liberalization in Mexico.

Work areas: Trafficking; Domestic Workers; Remittances; Gender and Migration.

Focal point: Latin America, Gender Bureau

Working Languages
English

Contact details:
Tel: +41 22 799 63 51
Fax: +41 22 799 88 36
E-mail: khan@ilo.org

Mr. Azfar Khan has been working as the Senior Migration Policy Specialist in MIGRANT since June 2006. Before taking up his current position, he worked as Development Economist in the ILO's InFocus Programme on Socio-Economic Security. He joined the ILO in 1995 as a Specialist on Migration, Urbanisation and Population Distribution and later took on the Population and Poverty portfolio in the ILO's Labour and Population Programme. Prior to his ILO tenure, he was working as a Senior Lecturer in Economics and Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands and was also the Convenor of the UNFPA's Global Programme of Training in Population and Development, which was based at the ISS. He did his under-graduate and post-graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and obtained a doctorate at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the U.K.

Work areas: Globalization and Migration; Migration and Development; Migration Policy.