Dr Nazia Yaqub

Profile

Before joining the University in 2023, Dr Yaqub spent several years in legal practice. She is a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales (non-practising) and previously represented clients before the English courts in prison law, criminal law, mental health, family and children’s law. After moving into academia, she completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool and has since taught Family Law, Children’s Rights, Criminal Law, Contract Law and International Human Rights Law. During this time, she has also held visiting academic posts at Otago (New Zealand) and Antwerp (Belgium), completed a postgraduate teaching diploma, and became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Responsibilities

• Module Convenor - Family Law
• Link Tutor - Malaysia and India
• HELP University (Malaysia) Assessment Reviewer

Research interests

Dr Yaqub’s monograph on cross-border parental child abduction is published (here) with Hart Publishing. It reflects on statistical and empirical data she collated to examine how domestic and international law policies could be developed to uphold the rights of abducted children. The monograph has been widely cited and has informed numerous reports by NGOs and charities, including in independent research published by the European Parliament. The research has global impact. Dr Yaqub was invited by the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to share her research expertise with state representatives and members of the judiciary at its Malta Conference (2024). She was also invited by the European Commission (Directorate-General for Justice) and the Council of the European Union to share her research on cross-border cooperation in family matters (Warsaw, 2025). In November 2025, she was further invited by the Federal Senate of Brazil to contribute as an international academic expert at a televised Public Hearing on cross-border parental child abduction convened by its Committee on Foreign Relations and National Defence, where she addressed the interaction between domestic custody frameworks and cross-border enforcement challenges.

Dr Yaqub continues to work on policy developments in this area, to both prevent abductions from occurring and to assess the implications of Islamic country accession to the Private International Law treaty, the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention. In 2023-24, she was awarded a Michael Beverly Innovation Fellowship, which enabled her to examine whether the use of electronic monitoring in a protective capacity could prevent cases of cross-border parental child abduction and whether the use of the technology is compatible with UK and international human rights law. The project enabled her to produce a full-size article, ‘Can GPS Monitoring Be Viewed as a Bodyguard, Rather than a Prison Guard?: The Use of Electronic Monitoring to Reduce the Risk of Cross-Border Parental Child Abduction’ published Open Access in the Modern Law Review (here) and translated into video format for non-academic audiences (here). In 2024, she received an Impact and Engagement Award to support her ongoing policy and public engagement activities in this area. In 2026, she was awarded funding under the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account to develop her project examining the intersection of criminal and family law in international parental child abduction cases, including the creation of a comparative database mapping criminal law responses and the production of a policy-facing report to inform legislative reform and judicial practice.

Dr Yaqub is engaged in a further study that focuses on the appropriate legal responses to improve adoption law processes for Muslim families. The project engages stakeholders, including adoption agencies and is funded by the SLSA Impact Fund. In 2022–2023, she was also awarded a Research England Policy Support Grant to work with colleagues at the Universities of Liverpool and Birmingham, together with NGOs Social Workers without Borders and BiD (Bail for Immigration Detainees), to examine the complex interplay between family and immigration law court processes. This strand of research, conceptualised as “famigration”, analyses how deportation and cross-border disputes affect children and advances structured proposals to integrate children’s rights and welfare assessments across family and immigration court processes. The findings have informed a written submission to the UK Parliament addressing procedural reform in cases involving children (report available here), and are detailed in this article published in the International Journal of Children’s Rights (2024) and in this edited collection (2025). She has previously undertaken projects with NGOs Freedom from Torture and Eurochild, and for the European Commission (report here) on the rights of children to healthcare, education, childcare, decent housing and adequate nutrition.

Dr Yaqub is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the Centre for Law and Social Justice and the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies. You can find her on bsky: @Drnazia-yaqub

Primary investigator (PI)

• The Criminalisation of Cross-Border Parental Child Abduction

Qualifications

• PhD
• Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching HE
• Postgraduate Diploma in Professional Legal Practice
• LLM
• LLB

Professional memberships

• Society of Legal Scholars
• Socio-Legal Scholars' Association
• Fellow of Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Authority)
• Solicitors Regulation Authority

Student education

I currently convene the Family Law module at undergraduate level and also teach International Human Rights Law across both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. In addition, I supervise research projects at both levels spanning my teaching and research areas.

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Criminal Justice Studies
• Centre for Law and Social Justice