Violeta Moreno-Lax

Dr. Violeta Moreno-Lax is Reader (Associate Professor) in Law, founder of the Immigration Law programme, and co-founder of the Centre for European and International Legal Affairs (CEILA) at Queen Mary University of London. She specialises in international and European migration and asylum law and borders and displacement studies, looking particularly at the issue of access to international protection, which she has investigated in her recent monograph: Accessing Asylum in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2017).

She teaches a course on the internal and external dimension of the EU Area of Freedom, Security and Justice as Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and is involved as Legal Advisor with the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN).

She also co-founded and coordinates the Search and Rescue Observatory for the Mediterranean (SAROBMED), launched to record human rights violations occurring in the course, or as a result, of interdiction/rescue operations at sea. Dr Moreno-Lax is also Senior Research Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative of the University of London, Co-Chair of The Refugee Law Observatory, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Migration Law Network.

She has previously been a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Law at the Universities of Liverpool and Oxford and held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and The Hague Academy of International Law, as well as at the Universities of New South Wales, Oxford, and Nijmegen.

She regularly consults for international and non-governmental organisations. Her latest work on Humanitarian Visas has formed the basis of the Resolution adopted by the European Parliament in December 2018. And her research on extraterritorial jurisdiction and maritime rescue substantiates the plaintiffs’ claim in S.S. and Others v. Italy, pending at the European Court of Human Rights, denouncing the ‘pull back’ policy of refoulement by proxy undertaken by Italy through the Libyan Coastguard.