Associate Professor Radha Govil

Overview

Radha Govil joined the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness as Deputy Director in 2023. Radha leads the Centre’s public policy engagement work, including where statelessness intersects with issues of climate change, gender discrimination, and multidimensional poverty. She teaches a Law Masters subject on Statelessness, Citizenship, and Legal Identity, and coordinates the new Statelessness Asia Pacific Research Network, an interdisciplinary network of scholars and researchers working on issues of statelessness in the region.

Radha leads the Centre’s public policy engagement work, including where statelessness intersects with issues of climate change, discrimination, multidimensional poverty, and legal identity . She teaches a Law Masters subject on Statelessness, Citizenship, and Legal Identity, and coordinates the new Statelessness Asia Pacific Research Network, an interdisciplinary network of scholars and researchers working on issues of statelessness in the region.

Prior to joining the Centre, Radha worked on issues relating to statelessness and nationality at UNHCR Headquarters in Geneva Switzerland since 2010. Radha has helped to produce many of UNHCR's key doctrinal and policy positions on statelessness, including in relation to the definition and status of a stateless person under international law, and standards relating to the prevention of childhood statelessness, as well as loss and deprivation of nationality in the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. She also developed and led the implementation of the IBelong Campaign, and conceptualised and built the foundational elements for the Global Alliance to End Statelessness.

Radha has advised Governments and has worked with statelessness experts and partner organisations globally. She has developed a wide range of practical tools to support them in their efforts to prevent and reduce statelessness, and to protect and identify stateless people. Her publications have included book chapters on statelessness and the sustainable development goals (Solving Statelessness, Wolf Press), women, nationality and statelessness (Nationality and Statelessness under International Law, Cambridge University Press), as well as field-based reports for UNHCR on climate change and human mobility, childhood statelessness , stateless minorities, statelessness and the rule of law.

Prior to working at UNHCR, Radha worked as a solicitor in Australia at Mallesons Stephen Jaques (now King Wood Mallesons). She holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne, and a Master in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science for which she was awarded the Lauterpacht-Higgens and Georg Schwazenberger prizes.