Bio
Natasha Yacoub is an international refugee law practitioner and scholar. She teaches international refugee law on at the University of London Refugee Law Initiative (RLI) MA programme. She coordinates the RLI Feminist Theory Working Group.
Ms Yacoub has worked for two decades for UNHCR, where she has been posted since 2001 in conflict and peacetime settings in Egypt, Sudan, Ireland, United Nations Headquarters New York, Myanmar, Australia and the Pacific Island States (including Nauru and Papua New Guinea). She also served as a decision-maker on the Refugee Review Tribunal and Migration Review Tribunal in Australia from 2012 to 2014.
She is also a doctoral scholar at the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales. Her thesis is titled: ‘Gendering the International Law Criteria for Return of Refugees: the case of Sudan.’
Publications
- Natasha Yacoub, “A new history of refugee protection in post-World War Two Southeast Asia: lessons from the Global South” Asian Journal of International Law (2022)
- Natasha Yacoub, “Australia’s Offshore Processing for Refugees as Neo-Colonialism” (Asylum Insight, 2022)
- David Cantor, Nikolas Feith Tan, Mariana Gkliati, Elizabeth Mavropoulou, Kathryn Allinson, Sreetapa Chakrabarty, Maja Grundler, Lynn Hillary, Emilie McDonnell, Riona Moodley, Stephen Phillips, Annick Pijnenburg, Adel-Naim Reyhani, Sophia Soares, Natasha Yacoub, “Externalisation, Access to Territorial Asylum, and International Law” International Journal of Refugee Law (2022)
- Yacoub, Errington, Nu, Robinson “Rights Adrift: Sexual Violence Against Rohingya Women on the Andaman Sea” Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law (2021) 22(1), 96-114
- Gleeson, Yacoub, “Cruel, costly and ineffective: the failure of offshore processing in Australia” (UNSW, Sydney, 2021)
- Yacoub, Schwartz, Bezanson, “Legal and Ethical Considerations of Palliative Care Provision in Humanitarian Crises”, in: Waldman, Glass (eds) Palliative Care in Humanitarian Crises (Oxford University Press, 2019)
- Yacoub, ‘Protecting civilians at the Security Council: Responsibility or politics?’ (Regnet, ANU, 2012)
Output
- Training for 125 decision-makers in Africa and the Middle East for International Association of Refugee Law Judges on feminist approaches to cessation of refugee status in December 2022, on the basis of the RLI blog on cessation and gender
- The 2023 RLI feminist theory blog series: https://rli.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2023/01/13/rekindling-feminist-approaches-to-legal-displacement/