UNSW Myanmar Development and Research Forum

Melissa Crouch is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW.  She served as Associate Dean (Research) from 2019-2021. Her research contributes to the fields of law and society;  comparative constitutional studies, and law and religion with a focus on Asia. Melissa is currently working on a project on Constitutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Myanmar, which is funded by the Australian Research Council. Melissa has published in a range of peer-reviewed journals including the Law & Society Review, International Journal of Constitutional Law and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.  She is the editor of several volumes, including Women and the Judiciary in the Asia-Pacific (CUP 2021). . Melissa’s recent book is  The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis (2019)  and was shortlisted for the Australian Legal Research Awards book prize. Melissa is the Vice-President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), the peak academic body for Asian studies in Australia.

Salai Samuel Hmung (Samuel) is a Research Associate working on the ARC-funded project ‘Constitutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Myanmar’. He is the recipient of an Australian Awards scholarship and was awarded his Master of Political Science (Advanced) from the Australian National University. His master thesis applied an original power-sharing framework to explore and compare the preferences of Myanmar’s elite political actors for power-sharing through their public statements from 2015-2020 by using a dictionary-based content analysis method. His broader research interests include power-sharing institutions, ethnic politics, and civil conflict. He has ten years’ professional experience in the field of peacebuilding, electoral politics, and youth activism in Myanmar. He has worked as a research officer for the Southeast Asia Rules-Based Order (SEARBO) project at the ANU’s Coral Bell School and as a research and communications officer at the ANU’s Myanmar Research Centre. He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in International Relations from the Yangon University and a Bachelor of Engineering (Information Technology) from the Yangon Technological University.

She was recognised by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Deans List in 2014, 2015 and 2017 for academic excellence. In 2016, she contributed to a submission by the UNSW Law Society for the Senate inquiry into the conditions and treatment of asylum seekers and refugees at the regional processing centres in the Republic of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. She was also named on the Faculty of Law Dean’s List in 2017 and 2019, for achieving first place in Law and Social Theory and Public Interest Litigation: Origins and Strategies.

Since completing his PhD, he was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Law School, the National University of Singapore. Since 2019, he has been a visiting fellow in the Myanmar Studies Programme at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He specialises in issues of identity, religion, Buddhist-Muslim relations, nationalism and populism, with a focus on Myanmar. His research has been published or is forthcoming in the Review of Faith & International Affairs, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Social Identities, and the Chinese Journal of Comparative Law. He has also contributed to several edited volumes on religion, constitutionalism, and citizenship.

An independent body responsible for supervising the election process, and disputes regarding the election process and administrative violations. Fritz completed his LL.B. from the Faculty of Law, the University of Indonesia. He holds a LL.M degree from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam and the University of New South Wales. In 2016, he completed his SJD at UNSW on judicial behaviour and judicialization of Indonesia Constitutional Court, receiving the Australian Leadership Award. From 2004–2009, Fritz was part of the founding generation of staff on the Indonesia Constitutional Court as a Justice Assistant to Justice Maruarar Siahaan. In 2006, he was selected as the first foreigner to work as an intern as Judicial Associate at the High Court of Australia. He also previously worked at the International Monetary Fund’s project on legal reform in Indonesia. Fritz has been a lecturer at several institutions, including the University of Indonesia, Indonesia Jentera School of Law. Fritz currently serves as Commissioner of Indonesia’s Election Supervisory Body (Bawaslu).

Melissa was a Victoria Police officer for 10 years (2001-2011) working at the frontline and in criminal investigations and is a current member of the Strategic Planning Committee for the International Association of Women Police (IAWP). In Victoria Police, she worked in general duties, criminal investigations, the Asian Squad (disbanded), drug taskforces and trained as an undercover operative. In 2005, she was the recipient of a scholarship to study Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, from the Victorian Multicultural Commission while working for Victoria Police.  Her PhD was on policing in Vietnam. In 2018-2019, Melissa is a consultant to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and UN Women in relation to gender, policing, border control and transnational crimes in ASEAN. Melissa has written and delivered a range of international police training packages regarding HIV prevention, harm reduction approaches to drug use and sex work, and police-public health leadership.  In 2017, Melissa was selected as an Asia 21 Young Leader by the Asia Society .

He comments frequently in the media on issues of law and human rights in Indonesia. He is an academic at a university based in Jakarta. In 2019, he was appointed by the President of Indonesia as a Commissioner of the Attorney General’s Commission, an independent accountability agency in Indonesia.

Milda has a Masters of Transnational Crime Prevention from the University of Wollongong, Australia. Milda teaches criminal law and criminology. She also researches on terrorism, deradicalisation programs, countering violent extremism as well as sentencing patterns and trends in terrorism offences, with a specialisation in Indonesia. Milda has been awarded a Masters’ scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Degree and Research of Indonesia, as well as PhD scholarship from the Ministry of Finance of Indonesia. Milda was the Chief Investigator on a Ministry of Higher Degree and Research Grant on ‘Deradicalisation Program in Indonesian Prisons’ (2012 – 2015). Milda is the deputy director of the Centre for Transnational Crime and Terrorism (Frontier), Brawijaya University.

Indri is the former Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (known as ELSAM), a prominent civil society organization based in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is a recipient of the prestigious Australian Awards Scholarship and The British Chevening Award. She has been the author of the Indonesia chapter of the ‘Freedom on the Net Report’, Freedom House (2016–present). She has contributed to numerous research reports, including the Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia (2008); A Gender Responsive Parliament: A Handbook on Gender Mainstreaming in the Legislature (UNDP Indonesia, 2008), as well as numerous other policy papers.

She was awarded her LLM from the National University of Malaysia. Lena is an expert in Islamic inheritance law, gender and family law, Islamic law and legal pluralism. She has previously worked as a facilitator for the Women and Children’s Protection and Empowerment Board of the South Kalimantan Provincial Government in Banjarmasin. In this role she facilitated the training of provincial government employees on gender issues and other legal matters.

Her other research interests include law and social theory, and human rights issues such as modern slavery and economic and social rights. In 2018, Madelene represented UNSW at the International Criminal Court Moot Competition addressing the issue of human trafficking within corporate supply chains, and prior to her legal studies she was a project officer for the Aurora Education Foundation, an NFP focused on supporting Indigenous education. In 2019-20, Madelene is the Human Rights Fellow at Legal Aid NSW where she is working with the Legal Aid Human Rights Committee.

He is also the Economics Speaker’s Director for the UNSW ASEAN Conference. David is interested in making a positive impact in Australia and Southeast Asian countries, specifically Indonesia. 

She is a research assistant to Associate Professor Melissa Crouch at UNSW Law. In 2017, Natasha worked as an intern on defence of an alleged Khmer Rouge genocidaire at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Since then she has published journal articles on political interference at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Her commentary on the ECCC has been published in academic blogs such as New Mandala. Further, she works as a case analyst at the Oxford Reports on International Law where she specialises in publishing headnotes on ECCC decisions. Since returning from Cambodia, Natasha has been involved in activism together with the Australia-Cambodian diaspora and other Australian citizens concerned about the political climate in Cambodia. She also has an interest in gender empowerment in South and Southeast Asia. She has published in New Mandala, the UNSW Law Journal, and Court of Conscious.

Prior to joining UNSW, Ayesha worked as a Research Associate in the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS) and was an Associate Editor of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. Ayesha graduated from NUS in 2017 with an LLM specialising in International and Comparative Law. She is also an Attorney-at-Law in Sri Lanka. She holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and a BA in French from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Ayesha takes a keen interest in comparative constitutional law, democracy and the rule of law, international humanitarian law and transitional justice.

Ms Yacoub is presently on leave from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where she has been posted since 2001 in conflict and non-conflict settings in Egypt, Sudan, Ireland, United Nations Headquarters New York, Myanmar, Australia and the Pacific Island States. She also served as a decision-maker on the Refugee Review Tribunal and Migration Review Tribunal in Australia from 2012 to 2014. Her research interests are ‘regional refugee protection’, refugee status determination, statelessness, protection of civilians and the protection of refugee women and girls.

This project lies in the intersection of constitutional law and critical theory and is as such, being jointly supervised in Philosophy and Law. He completed his LLB (Hon’s) and LLM degrees from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Before starting his PhD, he served as a lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. His research interests include constitutional theory, critical legal theory, political thought of Gandhi and Giorgio Agamben, post-structuralism and law and social theory. Currently, Sayeed is also a research assistant to Dr. Melissa Crouch on various legal and constitutional issues of Bangladesh.

He has worked as a paralegal in Financial Restructuring and Insolvency Team at Norton Rose Fulbright, Sydney Office. Prior to commencing his law degree, Sai was an operations manager at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), Myanmar Branch, overseeing payment and cash operations as well as markets operations. Previously, he was a project manager in the project to establish the Myanmar Branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited (ICBC). He was born and brought up in Taunggyi in eastern Myanmar and has a bachelor’s degree in economics from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Master of Professional Accounting from UNSW. His research interests include law and development, law and society, and comparative constitutional law. In2019 he was awarded the  Dean’s List of Excellence in Academic Performance for three subjects: Land Law; Legal Experimentalism and World Trade Law, and was shortlisted for the Valedictorian Award.

He is also an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations, University of Chittagong (currently on study leave to pursue PhD). His experience also includes working as a UNHCR protection staff in 2011-12 and as a research consultant with Equal Rights Trust, UK in 2015 where he wrote a report on the legal status of Rohingya in Bangladesh. Ashraful’s main research interests are Rohingya refugees, irregular migration, and labour migration in Bangladesh. His PhD research focuses on the migration of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh to Malaysia and the response of states towards such migration. This research analyses the irregular migration of stateless people and connects the mobility between South Asia and Southeast Asia. Ashraful has published several peer-reviewed papers including in the Journal of Human Trafficking, Griffith Journal of Law and Human Dignity and Chittagong University Journal of Social Sciences. He has also published short pieces in the Conversation and OpenDemocracy and commented in various media including Guardian (UK), Equal Times (Brussels), the Independent and Bangladesh Post (Bangladesh), ABC radio and TV (Australia), TRT World (Turkey), and Channel NewsAsia (Singapore). He also works as a Country of Origin Information expert for Bangladesh enlisted with the Rights in Exile Programme (IRRI) and has provided expert reports in several asylum cases.

Voleak has extensive experience in the Cambodian judicial system. From 2009 to 2014, Voleak worked at the Kandal Provincial Court, before being promoted to the Appellate Court in 2014. The Appellate Court is responsible for all cases appealed from the municipal and provincial courts, and the military court. In her court work, Voleak engaged in handling, processing, judicial decision making, enforcing judgments in a range of court cases, including civil and criminal cases. Her work also involved closely monitoring court administration, as well as participation in the judicial reform project. She commenced her PhD in 2019.