New Frontiers of Refugee Law in a Closed World
Tue, 17 Nov
|Online panel
UNSW’s Kaldor Centre Conference 2020 brings together leading thinkers from around the world with diverse perspectives, with sessions set to shape the agenda for refugees and other forced migrants in our post-pandemic world.


Time & Location
17 Nov 2020, 10:00 am AEDT – 19 Nov 2020, 7:00 pm AEDT
Online panel
About the event
A virus has laid bare our interconnectedness – for better and worse. Solidarity shone as people around the world stepped up to act with empathy. At the same time, borders slammed shut and reasoned debate ceded the platform to seething fear and rage. Under cover of COVID-19, laws and norms are shifting away from long-held principles. UNSW’s Kaldor Centre Conference 2020 brings together leading thinkers from around the world with diverse perspectives, with sessions set to shape the agenda for refugees and other forced migrants in our post-pandemic world.
Speakers
Louise Aubin
UNHCR Regional Representative

@UNHCRCanberra
Louise Aubin brings more than 25 years of legal, policy and humanitarian experience across the private and public sectors. For the past two years, she has served as UNHCR’s Regional Representative in the multi-country office based in Australia. Prior to that, she led large-scale emergency responses in several regions of the world, most recently in Bangladesh. With recognized expertise on internal displacement, Ms Aubin led the UN’s Global Protection Cluster. As UNHCR’s Deputy Director for International Protection, she developed policies with a focus on children, gender, education, and community-based programs. A Canadian lawyer and Irish national, she holds a degree in Political Science and a Juris Doctor in Law from the University of Ottawa (Canada) and a doctoral level degree in law from the Université de Poitiers (France).
Rez Gardi
Harvard Satter Human Rights Fellow

@RezGardi
Rez Gardi is an international lawyer and human rights activist. She was born in a refugee camp in Pakistan as her family escaped Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds. Arriving in New Zealand with nothing, Rez sought to use her difficult start in life as motivation to succeed, becoming New Zealand’s first Kurdish female lawyer. As a Fulbright Scholar she recently graduated with a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School. She currently works in Iraq as a Harvard Satter Human Rights Fellow building cases for the prosecution of ISIS for their targeted genocidal campaign against the Yezidis. She is the founder of ‘Empower’, a youth-led organisation aiming to address the underrepresentation of refugees in higher education. She is a co-founder of the Centre for the Asia Pacific Refugee Studies at the University of Auckland. Ms Gardi represented New Zealand in the first Global Refugee Youth Consultations in 2016 and helped form the Global Youth Advisory Council to the UNHCR. She was awarded the Young New Zealander of the Year in 2017 for her services to human rights and is an Eisenhower Youth Fellow. She was a Women of Influence Finalist and NEXT Woman of the Year Finalist in 2018. In 2019 she was awarded the Outstanding Youth Delegate Award at the UN Youth Assembly.
Cecilia Jimenez-Damary
Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons

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Cecilia Jimenez-Damary is a human rights and international humanitarian law expert specialised in forced displacement and migration. She has over three decades of experience in NGO human rights advocacy for the Asia-Pacific region and teaching experience as an adjunct professor of international human rights and humanitarian law. She previously acted as Senior Legal Adviser and Trainer with the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Geneva; as the National Director of the IDP Project of the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines; and as the government representative to the Philippine Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission for the Bangsamoro. She was appointed Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons by the Human Rights Council in September 2016 and assumed the mandate on 1 November 2016. She holds an LL.M. in Public International Law (King’s College London, UK); MDC in International Organizations-IOMBA programme (University of Geneva, Switzerland); LL.B. (Ateneo de Manila, Philippines); B.Sc. in Foreign Service (University of the Philippines).
Kathleen Newland
Senior Fellow and Co-Founder, Migration Policy Institute

@MigrationPolicy
Kathleen Newland is a Senior Fellow and Co-Founder of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). Her work focuses on the governance of international migration, the relationship between migration and development, and refugee protection. Prior to MPI’s establishment in July 2001, She co-directed the International Migration Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment. Earlier, she was a Lecturer in international political economy at the London School of Economics (1988–92) and Special Assistant to the Rector of the United Nations University (1982–87). She has worked as a consultant to the International Labor Organization, the International Organization for Migration, the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the World Bank.
Chair: Jane McAdam
Director, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law

@profjmcadam @kaldorcentre
Jane McAdam is Scientia Professor of Law and Director of the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, a Research Associate at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, an Associated Senior Fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway, and a Senior Research Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative in London. She was a non-resident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at The Brookings Institution, Washington DC from 2012–16, and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in fall 2019.