Dr Nazia Yaqub

Profile

Before joining the University in 2023, I spent several years in legal practice. I am a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales (non-practising) and represented clients in the areas of Prison Law, Crime, Mental Health, Family and Children’s law. After crossing to academia, I completed my PhD research at the University of Liverpool and have since taught Family Law, Children’s Rights, Criminal Law and Contract Law. During this time, I have also held visiting academic posts at Otago (New Zealand) and Antwerp (Belgium), completed a post-graduate teaching diploma and became a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

Responsibilities

• Link Tutor - Malaysia
• HELP University Assessment Reviewer

Research interests

My research interests span international human rights law, with my publishing record covering child rights, law and religion, belongingness theory, and family, crime and immigration law. I am a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales and previously represented clients in Criminal, Mental Health, Family and Children’s law.

My monograph titled ‘Parental Child Abduction to Islamic Law Countries: A Child Rights Analysis of the Legal Framework’, is published (here) with Hart Publishing. It examines statistical and empirical data collated to examine how domestic and international law policies should be developed to uphold the rights of abducted children. My monograph has been widely cited and has informed numerous reports by NGOs and charities  – including in independent research published by the European Parliament. I was invited by the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to share my research expertise with state representatives and members of the judiciary at its Malta Conference in 2024. I was also invited by the European Commission to share my research on parental child abduction in 2025.

I continue 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, I was awarded a Michael Beverly Innovation Fellowship which enabled me 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 me 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 to translate this novel research into video format for non-academic audiences (here). In 2024, I received an Impact and Engagement award to support my ongoing policy and public engagement activities in this area.

I am currently developing a research project that focuses on the appropriate legal responses to improve adoption law processes for Muslim communities in the UK. I am working with adoption agencies in community engagement work, funded by the SLSA Impact Fund. In 2022-2023, I was 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 implications of deportation law on the children of foreign offenders and the complex interplay between family and immigration law court processes. The research project is summarised in this article published in the International Journal of Children’s Rights in 2024. I have previously undertaken projects with NGOs Freedom from Torture and Eurochild, and on a study by the European Commission (report here) on the rights of children in Europe to healthcare, education,  childcare, decent housing and adequate nutrition.

I am 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 me on bsky: @Drnazia-yaqub

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 teach Family Law and International Human Rights Law, both at undergraduate and post graduate levels. I also supervise undergraduate and LLM dissertations across my teaching and research areas.

Research groups and institutes

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