Research Associate
Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
About
Dr Alice Edwards is Senior Legal Coordinator and Chief of the Protection Policy and Legal Advice Section, Division of International Protection, UNHCR in Geneva. She was previously on the law faculties of the universities of Oxford and Nottingham. She remains a Research Associate, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford, Research Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford; and Fellow, Nottingham's Human Rights Law Centre. She holds degrees in Political Science and Law with Honours from the University of Tasmania (1995), a LL.M in Public International Law awarded with Distinction (first class) from the University of Nottingham (2003), a Diploma in International and Comparative Human Rights Law from the Institut International des Droits de l'Homme in Strasbourg (2005) and named top student, and a PhD in Public International Law from The Australian National University, where she studied under a prestigious Australian Postgraduate Award (2008).
Dr Edwards is a past recipient of an Arthur C. Helton Fellowship of the American Society of International Law and winner of the 2008 Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in the Human Rights of Women.
Dr Edwards has also taught at the University of Tasmania, The Australian National University, and the University of Tulsa Study Abroad Program in London; and has guest lectured at the universities of Westminster and Roehampton. She was Book Reviews Editor for the European Human Rights Law Review (2010-11) and is a General Editor of the Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies. She is also on the board of the International Detention Coalition.
Dr. Edwards has also worked as a protection, legal and gender adviser to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Morocco and Geneva (at HQ), refugee policy adviser at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London, and communications manager at Food for the Hungry International in Mozambique. In 2001-2002, she was responsible for the 'second track' of UNHCR's Global Consultations on International Protection, and the development of a new series of Guidelines on International Protection to supplement UNHCR's Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status, including drafting many of the authoritative texts.
She is widely published and cited on refugee law, human rights, and gender/feminist theory. She regularly advises, consults and trains international and non-governmental organizations and governments on the same issues. Her work includes over twenty journal articles and book chapters, as well as a co-edited collection, Human Security and Non-Citizens: Law, Policy and International Affairs (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and her monograph entitled, Violence against Women and International Human Rights Law (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Her work has been cited in asylum proceedings before the New Zealand Refugee Appeals Authority and the Swiss Federal Administrative Tribunal, and by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture; and she was the author of the background paper for the first-ever seminar of its kind between the UNHCR and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women held at the UN in New York in 2009, entitled Displacement, Statelessness and Questions of Gender Equality under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Aug. 2009). The Executive Summary is available in English, French and Spanish at UN Doc. CEDAW/C/2009/II/WP.3, 1 July 2009. She is admitted to practice as a barrister and solicitor before the Supreme Court of Victoria and the High Court of Australia.
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