Education
- Juris Doctor, Northeastern University School of Law, Boston, MA (1996-1999)
- B.A. in Mathematics (Certificate in Women’s Studies), Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH (1990-1994)
Research Interests
- Feminist legal theory and practice
- International human rights law
- Jurisprudence
- Forced conversions and religious minority rights in Sindh
- Urban violence, displacement, and resilience
- Labor and gender-based violence law
Biography
Abira Ashfaq has been Associate Professor of Practice in Social Development and Policy at Habib University since January 2025. She is a human rights lawyer and legal scholar with over two decades of combined litigation, advocacy, teaching, and research experience in Pakistan and the United States.
She has been Visiting Faculty at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) since January 2019, teaching Feminist Legal Theory and Practice, Jurisprudence, and International Human Rights. Since 2020, she has done advocacy and litigation work with the Indigenous Rights Alliance in Karachi, bringing cases before UN rapporteurs and using grievance mechanisms of international financial institutions to challenge climate-unfriendly infrastructure projects and forced evictions in Sindh. She has also served as an Advisory Member of the Sindh Human Rights Commission since 2021, reviewing laws on minority rights and victims’ protections.
Her earlier career includes research and scholarship on the ideological and social aspects of forced religious conversions in Sindh with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (2022); research on urban violence, displacement, and resilience for the International Committee of the Red Cross, authoring Understanding Urban Resilience, Migration, Displacement & Violence in Karachi (2018-2019); participatory research with home-based workers for the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law & Development (2017-2019); and a decade as Faculty of Law at SZABIST, Karachi (2007-2018), teaching Criminal Law and Jurisprudence for the University of London International LLB Program, where she also developed the law school’s legal clinic and led advocacy campaigns that contributed to statutory reform on ambulance right-of-way laws and missing children’s rights.
In the United States, Ashfaq was a Clinical Instructor with the Immigration & Asylum Project at Boston College Law School (2001-2003), conducting legal clinics, teaching Advanced Immigration Law, and representing non-citizens in removal proceedings; she received the PAIR Project’s “Detention Attorney of the Year” award in 2003. She was also a Researcher & Consultant for the Fund for Global Human Rights, Washington DC (2013-2017), authoring Pakistan country reports on human rights trends and developing strategies on gender-based violence, children’s rights, and labor rights across multiple districts of Pakistan.
Honors & Awards
- PAIR Project’s “Detention Attorney of the Year,” 2003
- College Tucker Fellowship with Amnesty International (Refugee Office), San Francisco, CA, 1993
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