South Asian Heritage Month in the UK was co-founded in 2019 by Jasvir Singh CBE and Dr Binita Kane.

Jasvir Singh CBE and Dr Binita Kane’s mission was to use the heritage month to ‘deepen people’s understanding of the rich and diverse contributions of South Asian communities to British society’. First celebrated in 2020, it commemorates, marks and celebrates South Asian cultures, histories, and communities. The dates of the month (18 July – 17 August) are designed to span several Independence Days across the region (Maldives, Bhutan, Pakistan, India). It also roughly coincides with Saravan/Sawan, the primary monsoon month during which the region’s habitat undergoes renewal.

Our academic strategy for 2020 to 2030 ‘Universal Values, Global Change’, sets a blueprint for a values-driven university that harnesses expertise in research and education to help shape a better future for humanity. The School of Law is proud to have staff that strengthen the vital link between South Asia and the UK by conducting impactful research that addresses global inequalities, highlights the significant contributions of South Asian countries on the international stage, and makes a tangible difference in the world.

Read on to discover their research profiles.

Big data and the Global South

Professor Subhajit Basu, Professor of Law and Technology, investigates the numerous challenges posed by digital technologies across various societal sectors, including transport, education, healthcare, and social justice. Renowned internationally for pioneering interdisciplinary research, Professor Basu's work particularly emphasizes the Global South. Recognizing the potential for ‘big data’ to control lives, Professor Basu is deeply interested in enhancing consumer information and empowerment. Additionally, he seeks to update legal frameworks to better protect privacy and provide the public with the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions. From 2018 to 2021, he served as the Chair of the British and Irish Law Education Technology Association. In 2020, he was honoured with the Hind Rattan by the Non-Resident Indians Welfare Society of India for outstanding contributions to education and achievements in Information Technology Law.

He is an Adjunct Professor at Parul University, as well as a Visiting Scholar at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. He also became the International Advisor of The Dialogue think tank last year. He sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of two Indian Law School journals: NUJS Journal of Regulatory Studies and NALSAR Law Review.

This year alone, he has delivered 7 Keynotes or been Invited Speaker at conferences organised in India, including a keynote at the prestigious Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur. This year he also published two articles centring India:

Evaluating ICT Adoption in the Indian Judiciary: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Impact of the eCourts Project and Silenced Voices: Unravelling India's Dissent Crisis Through Historical and Contemporary Analysis of Free Speech and Suppression.

Professor Basu is a member of the Centre for Business Law and Practice.

You can find him on X: basu_subhajit and LinkedIn: Subhajit Basu.

Challenging exclusionary city streets

Dr Sanjay Jain, an outstanding blind scholar who was formerly the Principal of the Indian Law Society College of Law University in Pune, is now based at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.

Dr Jain’s publications, which have been quoted by the Indian Supreme Court, include leading works on Indian Constitutional Law as well as on issues of disability and human rights in India. His advice is regularly sought by members of the judiciary, the administration and civil society.

Dr Jain, and his institutions in Pune and Bengaluru, have been collaborating with Professor Anna Lawson and colleagues at the School of Law, University of Leeds, since 2018. In that year, Dr Jain began acting as the Indian partner for the Leeds-based Inclusive Public Space research project. This project, funded by the European Research Council, explores ways in which law can more effectively be used to challenge the disadvantage (to disabled and older pedestrians in particular) caused by inaccessible, exclusionary aspects of city streets. The project shines a light on such barriers and legal initiatives in ten cities across five countries: India being one of them. Dr Jain is the lead author of an extensive report on relevant Indian law and policy and has played a vital role in facilitating and supporting the fieldwork in India.

Besides Dr Jain’s collaboration with Leeds through the Inclusive Public Space project, the Leeds Centre for Disability Studies has supported and co-hosted two international conferences led by Dr Jain during his time at Pune. He will support three events in India in July and August. Dr Jain will be visiting Leeds in September 2024 – when he will take part in the Inclusive Public Space final conference on 16-17 September as well as a number of other events.

Migrant stories and experiences

Dr Amrita Limbu’s research delves into the lived experiences of individuals from migrant communities and from low- and moderate-income backgrounds. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Law working on the Making it to the Registers: Documenting Migrant Carers’ Experiences of Registration and Fitness to Practice project with Professor Marie-Andrée Jacob (Primary Investigator) and Dr Priyasha Saksena (Co-Investigator). In this role, she is involved in archival and qualitative research exploring the migrant and refugee health professionals’ experience with professional registration in the UK.

She completed her PhD on migration and affective family relations across two migration pathways of education migration and labour migration from Nepal from the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.

She is interested in migrant stories and experiences, and experiences of transnational family life owing to migration and living away from her family. Prior to her PhD, she was a researcher at Social Science Baha’s Centre for the Study of Labour and Mobility (CESLAM) in Kathmandu, Nepal. At CESLAM, she conducted research and fieldwork for several projects focused on labour migration from Nepal to the Persian Gulf and Malaysia.

In 2024 she completed a research project on ‘Migration and the Persistence of Inequality’ as part of the University of Leeds Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship, to understand the inequality and the continual cycle of intergenerational migration from Nepal to the Persian Gulf countries.

She is part of a University of Reading-led consortium on transnational families – and presented at their symposium Migration, Care and Intersecting Inequalities in June 2024, with ‘Care, inequality, and intergenerational migration: Cultural insights on care and migration in Nepal’. Dr Limbu was the lead author of their policy briefing paper: Impact of COVID-19 on migrant families in the UK, published in March 2024. In May this year she gave a paper at the Britain-Nepal Academic Council Nepal Study Days.

She is a member of the Centre for Law and Social Justice.

Policing, community resilience and climate change

Dr Ali Malik is a lecturer in Criminal Justice. Dr Malik leads the project ‘Policing and community resilience in the context of climate change’, funded by Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre. His current research focuses on the role of police and local governance actors in preparing for and responding to climate disasters and extreme weather events. He is interested in exploring how police and local governance actors perceive, categorise, and track climate vulnerability, and how they leverage community-based actors to inform local emergency planning and disaster response activity.  He is also leading a project funded by the University of Leeds’ Research Culture Research Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (REDI) Fund to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change on marginalised communities and public services in the UK through the use of visual (photography) and aural (stories) narratives.

As the holder of the Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship (Cohort 4, 2023-24), Dr Malik has been involved in fostering collaborative ties with local police forces and national bodies such as HMICS, the College of Policing, and the Police Foundation to garner support for co-produced research examining the impact of climate change on local communities and local police and first responders. Additionally, to develop links with international scholars and researchers in this field, in December 2023, Dr Malik participated in a symposium on Policing the Climate Crisis as part of the Australian and New Zealand Criminology Conference, held in Melbourne.

His book, The Politics of Police Governance: Scottish Police Reform, Localism, and Epistocracy (Policy Press) was launched in May 2024. In the book he developed an innovative framework that synthesised the concept of epistocracy with the broader scholarship on democratic policing, public administration, and police governance and accountability.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and co-Deputy Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies. He also appeared in the University of Leeds’ Celebrate Our Staff for the month of May 2024.

Find him on Twitter/X: @DrAliMalik_

Equity in international relations

Professor Surya Subedi OBE, KC, DCL, is Professor of International Law.

He has published 12 books and more than 60 scholarly articles in all major areas of international law in leading international law journals throughout his academic career. His publications emphasize the promotion of equity in international relations and the advancement of human rights.

At his OBE investiture he was described as having:

...made a highly distinguished contribution to our understanding of international law, and to its evolution" while his work in international law had "spanned almost every aspect of it – with a special focus on issues ... which make a real difference to people's lives.

He has been an advisor to: the British Foreign Secretary (2010-2015); World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (2021); and a member of the Task Force on Investment Policy of the World Economic Forum (2015). He served for six years as the UN’s Special Rapporteur for human rights in Cambodia. In Nepal, he assisted the Prime Minister and other political leaders in resolving a 10-year Maoist conflict and in writing a new democratic constitution. 

This year, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ commended his achievements as a significant member of the Nepali diaspora. He said:

I sought Professor Surya Subedi’s assistance while drafting the Constitution of Nepal and reviewing past treaty agreements with India. He played a crucial role in those endeavours. Even in the recent Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) agreement, his input provided a middle-path which we embraced.

Between 2015 and 2022, he was Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Asian Journal of International Law, which is published by Cambridge University Press. He is also the editor of a Routledge series of books on ‘Human Rights and International Law’.

He was recently elected a Council Member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britian and Ireland.

Professor Subedi is a member of Centre for Business Law and Practice.

The rights of abducted children

Dr Nazia Yaqub is a lecturer in law, and her research interests span international human rights law, with her publishing record covering family law, child rights, law and religion, Islamic family law and cross-border parental child abduction. Dr Yaqub is a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales and previously represented clients in Criminal, Mental Health, Family and Children’s law.

Dr Yaqub’s 2022 book Child Abduction to Islamic Law Countries examines statistical and empirical data she collated to explore how domestic and international law policies should be developed to uphold the rights of abducted children. Dr Yaqub is invited by the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to share this research later this year with government officials and judges at its Fifth Malta Conference. 

Dr Yaqub continues to work on policy developments in this area to prevent abductions and assess the implications of Islamic country accession to the Private International Law treaty, the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention. In this endeavour, she examines whether the use of GPS monitoring can be viewed as a bodyguard rather than a prison guard, to reduce the risk of cross-border parental child abduction, to be published in the leading journal, the Modern Law Review. She also received funding as a Michael Beverly Innovation Fellow to disseminate this novel research in video format.

In other projects, Dr Yaqub is working with adoption agencies in community engagement work, to improve adoption law processes for Muslim communities in the UK. And on the legal subject of ‘fam-migration’, she is working with colleagues at the Universities of Liverpool and Birmingham, together with NGOs: Social Workers without Borders and Bid (Bail for immigration detainees) investigating the complex interplay between family and immigration law court processes and decision-making.

Dr Yaqub is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is a member of the Centre for Law and Social Justice and the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies. You can find her on X/Twitter: @DrNazia_Yaqub

The School of Law takes immense pride in counting such brilliant researchers among our staff, reflecting our commitment to using research to tackle some of the most important issues facing the global community today.