The constitutional right to asylum: the wave of the future in international refugee law? (Speaker: Prof. Stephen Meili, University of Minnesota Law School)

About the speaker:
Professor Stephen Meili writes and teaches about the rights of non-citizens, particularly those seeking asylum. His recent publications include a comparative study of the detention of asylum-seekers in the U.S. and the U.K., (NYU Journal of International Law and Politics 2015), the right not to hold a political opinion as the basis for asylum (Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 2015) and a human rights-based analysis of U.S. refugee resettlement policy (International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 2016). He has also published extensively on cause lawyering in comparative perspective. His research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Robina Foundation. He teaches courses on Immigration Law, Human Rights Law and Legal Practice.

Stephen has been an Academic Visitor at the Faculty of Law at Oxford University, as well as a Senior Associate Member at Oxford’s St. Antony’s College. He has taught classes to students at several law schools in Medellin, Colombia and at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Stephen Meili also serves as Director of the Law School’s Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, where students represent asylum-seekers and detained individuals in various immigration and appellate court proceedings. Over the past few years, the IHR Clinic has obtained asylum or other forms of protection for applicants from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Guinea, Honduras, Iran, Liberia, Syria, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Zimbabwe.