Author: Emilie McDonnell

Emilie McDonnell is a DPhil in Law candidate and the 2016 Tasmanian Rhodes Scholar. Her research focuses on protecting the right to leave and related human rights of asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants when migration control is conducted extraterritorially and has been outsourced to states of origin and transit, private actors and international organisations. She is supervised by Professor Cathryn Costello and Professor Miles Jackson. Emilie completed the MPhil in Law in 2018 and the BCL with Distinction in 2017 at University College, Oxford. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Criminology) and a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours in Law from the University of Tasmania. Emilie is also a qualified lawyer from Australia and an Adjunct Researcher at the University of Tasmania School of Law. In 2013, she co-founded and was a Director until 2016 of Tasmania’s first community legal centre for refugees, asylum seekers and humanitarian entrants, the Tasmanian Refugee Legal Service. She is a Research Assistant at the Oxford Human Rights Hub, a Co-Convenor of the Refugee and Migration Law Discussion Group, and a Student Resident at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative, an Associate Member of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, University of Cambridge, and a Member of the Asia-Pacific research group and Emerging Scholars Network at Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney. She has tutored FHS undergraduates in Medical Law and Ethics and taught on several summer school programmes in Oxford. She recently coached the winning Oxford team at the European Human Rights Moot Court Competition, Strasbourg April 2019. Emilie was awarded the 2019 Samuel Pisar Travelling Fellowship in Human Rights from the BIHR to enable her to undertake an internship with the Department of Legal Affairs at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Jerusalem between July-October 2019.
  1. Human Rights Law
  2. International Law
  3. Right to Leave

Australia’s Visa Regime and the Right to Leave Any Country: Fostering Irregular Migration and Harm

Destination states do not wait for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants to arrive at their borders. Rather, visa requirements are in place to proactively prevent certain non-nationals leaving the state they are in and their arrival at their borders. Visas represent a long-standing mechanism to control the movement of persons. Already in the 1920s, the […]
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Towards a Bangladesh Model BIT: The Chevron Dues and the Case for Reform

In April 2025, Bangladesh’s state-owned gas company Petrobangla cleared all of Chevron’s outstanding gas bills from previous years. Within days of this payment, Petrobangla formally urged Chevron to resume work on the stalled $65 million Jalalabad compressor project. Petrobangla Chairman told the press, ‘…we have already cleared all outstanding arrear payments of Chevron Bangladesh.’ Chevron […]
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The 15th Amendment Case before the High Court Division: An Analytical Perspective

Background On 17 December 2024, the High Court Division (HCD) of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh (SCOB) delivered a historic judgment regarding the Constitution (Fifteenth Amendment) Act, 2011 (Act No. XIV of 2011). The 15th Amendment removed the Non-Party Caretaker Government (NPCG) system for conducting general elections and made numerous other constitutional changes. This write-up […]
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