Shazia Choudhry

Shazia is Professor of Law and the Jeffrey Hackney Tutorial Fellow in Law at Wadham. She is also an Academic Bencher  and Associate Academic Fellow at the Inner Temple.

Her research is focused on gender, human rights and violence against women and seeks to examine various dimensions of these areas from an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective. In doing so she employs doctrinal, theoretical and empirical methods. Her scholarship sits at the interface of criminal law, human rights law and family law.

She has published three books. Her monograph (with Herring) European Human Rights and Family Law (Hart, 2010) provides a theoretically informed and detailed analysis of the impact of the ECHR and the HRA on the substantive areas of family law. She is also editor with Herring and Wallbank of Rights, Gender and Family Law (Routledge-Cavendish 2009) a collection which explores the links between gender and rights and editor with Herring of The Cambridge Companion to Comparative Family Law (Cambridge University Press 2019) a collection which explores the key questions and themes that have faced family law across a number of key jurisdictions. A full list of her publications can be found below.

Her work within the field of violence against women and human rights is also evidenced by her advisory work and appointments. This has included her appointment as Specialist Adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights Inquiry into Violence against Women (2014-15) and Specialist Adviser to the Joint Committee on the Draft Domestic Abuse Bill (2019), as an expert evaluator for the European Commission, as an expert for the Council of Europe (including participating in the GREVIO monitoring mission to Serbia) and as an expert consultant for the UNFPA. She is also an expert advisor to Women’s Aid on research, policy and training. Her research on the issue of child contact and victims of domestic abuse has been drawn upon by members of the judiciary, members of Parliament, the Victims Commissioner and the Home Affairs (Parliamentary) Committee in its recent report on the proposed Domestic Abuse Bill 2018. In 2024, Shazia was nominated by the UK Government as their first ever nominee to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination of Women (CEDAW).  The Committee is the body of independent experts that monitors implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. UK CEDAW candidate brochure: Professor Shazia Choudhry (HTML) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

She has also worked on two externally funded projects.  The first, with Dr Philippa Williams (Geography) as Joint PI, is a British Academy funded project under the Heritage, Dignity and Violence Call: ‘Surviving Violence: Everyday Resilience and Gender Justice in Rural-Urban India.' The multidisciplinary project was conducted over a 21-month period and completed in 2023. It draws on civil society -academic partnerships in 3 key states in India and aims to address the gap between law, policy and access to support services and justice for domestic abuse victims in India and to inform evidence-based policy reform. Surviving Violence | Home

The second, as sole PI, is a two year project awarded major funding by the Oak Foundation: ‘The Family Justice Response to Allegations of Domestic Abuse: A Comparative European Analysis.’ Working with key stakeholders in the family justice system across six European Countries (England & Wales, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Bosnia & Herzegovina) analyses how applications for contact and residence are dealt with against the context of domestic abuse allegations. It aims to investigate key themes in the implementation of family law in this area within the context of state obligations towards victims of domestic abuse and inform law and policy responses where necessary and was completed in August 2024.