Associate Research Fellow
Research keywords: trafficking in persons; criminal law; Caribbean; decolonisation; socio-legal research; International Law; gender, youth and human rights; international human rights law
Dr Cherisse Francis is an educator, researcher and consultant from the Caribbean. She has been involved in human rights advocacy and programming for over a decade. However, Cherisse began her career as a legal professional having graduated from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus with a Bachelor of Laws (First Class Honours) and the University of Aberdeen with a Master of Laws (Distinction). She also attended the Hugh Wooding Law School where she completed her Legal Education Certificate on the Principal's Honour Roll and was called to the Barbadian legal bar in 2018.
After her LLM, Cherisse spent a short time as an intern at the United Nations Office for Barbados and the OECS before accepting a position with the Human Trafficking Institute (HTI). From 2019 to 2020 Cherisse was employed by the HTI as Judicial Research Assistant to the designated Trafficking in Persons Judge in the Belizean High Court. In this role she was involved in legal writing and research as well as training activities for state and non-state actors both in Belize and across the Caribbean. These experiences led Cherisse to pursue her PhD studies examining anti-trafficking in the Anglophone Caribbean at the University of Warwick, UK which she completed in 2024.
At present, Cherisse is a Senior Lecturer (Law) at St.Mary's University, Twickenham where she has taught modules on Organised Crime, Trafficking and Contemporary slavery, International Human Rights Law, Criminal law and other related topics. She also serves as a trustee for the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (London Office) and is a founding member and part of the leadership team for the Caribbean Coalition against Trafficking in Persons. In this capacity Cherisse leads the regional stakeholder mapping project and co-leads the research committee. She has also recently been confirmed as an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Notably, Dr.Francis continues to speak, write, publish and train others on human-rights issues within the Caribbean and in the wider Commonwealth context.
