Surabhi Chopra

Surabhi Chopra is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong.  She currently leads the project, Immigration Detention and Vulnerable Migrants in Hong Kong: Evaluating the System, Facilitating Reform. In collaboration with Justice Centre Hong Kong, this three-year project is the first significant examination of the immigration detention system in Hong Kong. She also researches the deployment of citizenship and immigration regimes in the service of religious majoritarianism in India.

Her work on immigration regimes grew out of her research on national security laws and violence against minorities, as well as past experience as a barrister. She led a project using India’s right to information law to extract a unique set of records on some of the country’s worst episodes of mass sectarian violence (Chopra & Jha eds. On Their Watch: Mass Violence and State Apathy in India 2014). Her work has been published in, inter alia, Law and Social Inquiry, Asian Journal of Law and Society, the Boston University International Law Journal, and the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

She has provided legal advice, research, training and policy advocacy services to, inter alia, the International Development Research Centre (Government of Canada), Human Rights Watch, ActionAid, UNICEF, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (Government of India) and the Indian Ministry of Finance.

She was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 2006 and completed pupillage with Tooks Chambers, London. As a barrister in London and New Delhi, she worked on criminal defence, asylum and immigration, and anti-discrimination cases, including cases before the European Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. 

Her work is available on SSRN, Academia.edu and Researchgate. She tweets at @ProfChopra.