Professor Daniel Ghezelbash

Daniel is a Professor and the Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, and an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow. 

He is an internationally recognised scholar of international and comparative refugee and migration law. His ARC DECRA Fellowship examines comparative practices to develop recommendations for improving the fairness and efficiency of Australia's asylum procedures. He has also published widely on the way restrictive asylum policies have spread around the world. This is the topic of his book, Refuge Lost: Asylum Law in an Interdependent World (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has spent time as a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School.

Daniel is passionate about using technology to increase access to justice and to counter systemic discrimination and bias in the legal system. He is the founder of the Kaldor Centre Data Lab, through which he has pioneered computational and data-driven approaches to studying administrative and judicial decision-making in refugee cases. He is one of Australia's leading experts on legal technology and generative AI. He has been involved in establishing numerous initiatives using technology to increase access to justice including Wallumatta Legal, a not-for-profit law firm which provides low-cost legal advice to family law litigants that would otherwise be unrepresented, and the Hear Me Out Complaints Platform, which aims to harness the power of complaint making to combat systemic discrimination in Australia.

Daniel was formerly the Deputy Director of the Kaldor Centre, and the co-lead of the Access to Justice and Technology Stream at the UNSW Allens Hub for Law, Technology and Innovation. In his previous role, he founded and directed the award winning Macquarie University Social Justice Clinic and led the Law and AI stream at the Macquarie AI-enabled Processes Research Centre. 

Daniel is a practicing refugee lawyer. He is Special Counsel at the National Justice Project, and sits on the boards of a number of not-for-profit legal centres, including the Refugee Advice and Casework Service and Wallumatta Legal. He is also a founder and board member of the Access to Justice and Technology Network, which promotes and supports the uptake of legal technology in Australia's not-for-profit legal sector. 

Daniel regularly features and published in domestic and international media outlets on refugee, migration, access to justice and legal technology issues. In 2021, he was selected for the ABC Top 5 Humanities Media Residency.