Natasha Yacoub
Email: n.yacoub@unsw.edu.au

Bio
Natasha Yacoub is an international refugee law practitioner and scholar. At RLI, she chairs the Feminist Theory Working Group and teaches on the MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies. Ms Yacoub is 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 the return of refugees and internally displaced persons: case study on the Sudan’. She is on leave from 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. Her research interests are 'regional refugee protection', refugee status determination, statelessness, protection of civilians and feminist legal theory.
Recent Publications
- Natasha Yacoub, "Re-thinking the history of refugee protection in post-World War Two Southeast Asia: lessons from non-signatory states to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees", 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 (2021) "Rights Adrift: Sexual Violence Against Rohingya Women on the Andaman Sea" Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law 22(1), 96-114.
- Madeline Gleeson, Natasha Yacoub, "Cruel, costly and ineffective: the failure of offshore processing in Australia" (UNSW, Sydney, 2021).