Dr Shahab Saqib is a Barrister (non-practising) at Gray's Inn and an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham. He has previously worked as a lecturer in law at the University of Leicester, a teaching fellow at SOAS University of London, and a teaching consultant at Oxford Summer Courses. He has also been a visiting research fellow at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a member of the Global Scholars Academy at Harvard Law School.

Dr Saqib’s research focuses on Anti-Discrimination Law, International Human Rights Law, Critical Legal Theory, Islamic Law, Immigration Law, and the laws of Pakistan. He is interested in examining the limitations of equality through a decolonial lens while demystifying the constructs of law and exploring their impacts in a socio-legal space. Dr Saqib has published in various journals and articles, including in the Leiden Journal of International Law, Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis.

Dr Saqib practices in commercial, Islamic, and human rights law. Based on his academic and legal expertise, he has given expert consultation to different international bodies like the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW) on a ‘joint general recommendation/comment on public policies for addressing xenophobia and its impact on human rights’. He also led a micro-credential project for University of London external degree programmes.

Dr Saqib is also actively engaged in community-focused work. He was a board member of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), one of the largest pan-European anti-racism networks. In this role, he contributed to the development of policy strategies, research initiatives, and advocacy campaigns addressing racial injustice, with a particular focus on discrimination and the lived experiences of racialised and migrant communities. Dr Saqib regularly delivers workshops and training sessions, especially tailored for marginalised groups. These sessions aim to raise legal awareness, build capacity, and empower individuals to navigate systems that often marginalise them. His community engagement bridges academic research and grassroots activism, ensuring that his scholarship remains grounded in the realities of those most affected by exclusionary legal and social structures.

Dr Saqib’s research critically interrogates discrimination laws and their societal repercussions. He has a special interest in examining the historical genealogy of citizenship and how it acts as a proxy to further inequality. He approaches international law from third world approaches to international law (TWAIL) lens to challenge the legal episteme through a decolonial lens. He is also interested in comparative legal systems, indigenous studies, and religious laws, notably Islamic law, to conceptualise an alternative.

His publications provide a nuanced way of understanding equality. His paper, ‘Race as Citizenship Personified’ deconstructs ‘colour’ as a reliable factor to define race. He metaphorically establishes that it is an idiom to falsify the inequalities associated with race. Similarly, his paper on ‘Race Convention’ analyses different cases decided by the committee to argue how it misunderstands the evolving nature of racial discrimination. He is currently working on different projects that focus on identity formation through legal categories, with a special interest in race, citizenship, and migration, and their profound impacts on the lives and health of marginalised communities.

Dr Saqib is also a convenor of the Equality and Human Rights Law stream at the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), where he curates panels, workshops and roundtables that foreground cutting-edge research on structural discrimination. He is also an active member of the Critical Legal Conference (CLC), where he participates in different working groups. In addition, he is a member of ICON-S, where he is introducing an interest group on critical public law, aimed at interrogating how ostensibly neutral administrative and constitutional frameworks perpetuate exclusion and affect different communities.