Law Professor Awarded Grant from Harvard Law School

Victoria Ronderos/Contributing Writer

The world is constantly on the move, but many people in Asia are without protection when they migrate.

Harvard Law School has awarded FIU Law Professor Cyra Choudhury the Santander & Institute for Global Law & Policy Doha Collaborative Research Grant. This grant will help enable Choudhury TO support her research initiative, “Avenues of Legal Reform of Transnational and International Labor Laws in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia.”

Cyra Choudhury

Cyra Choudhury

Choudhury is from Bangladesh, located east of India, and has been passionate about this issue for quite some time.

“I spent part of my growing-up years in the Middle East, and my father was a diplomat, and so he dealt with a lot of these labor issues on a day-to-day basis,” said Choudhury. “It’s been an ongoing problem.”

With the grant, her research initiative strives to create a legal reform proposal to help regulate migrant laborers who travel from South Asia to the Middle East, specifically in countries such as India, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia.

“It’s always been interesting to me; [the] aspiration is to go, and, you know, make a better life for the people at home,” Choudhury said.

Benjamin Smith, an international relations professor and a member of the Middle East studies faculty, said that the labor migration situation in South Asia and the Middle East has been occurring since the 1970s.

“There was suddenly a big increase in oil, and suddenly these countries in the Gulf region [had] a lot more money. They decided to develop their economies, and they [didn’t] have enough local people to do it, so they [started] importing labor,” said Smith.

Choudhury plans to first visit Bangladesh and India.

“There’s a number of countries to choose from; I could’ve picked any number of places, but Bangladesh is where I come from,” said Choudhury. “For logistical reasons, it’s easier to go to a place you know when you’re starting off a new project than some place that you’ve never been before.”

Besides the research initiative, Choudhury has also published articles regarding the correlation between gender and religious identity for Muslims in South Asia and international human rights theory.

She received her bachelor’s degree in political science at the College of Wooster, received her master’s degree in comparative politics at Columbia University and received her law degree at Georgetown University.

Choudhury has been a part of a network of scholars through the Institute for Global Law Policy, which is supported by Harvard Law School.  Its focus is on international and transnational law and policy.

“It’s a travel grant, so it’s actually quite modest. But it’s enough to get me there, get me into offices and get some contacts [to] do some field research,” said Choudhury. “Right now, this is very preliminary research. Hopefully a paper will come out of it, and I’m hoping that there will be funding for a conference that comes out of it.”

Choudhury plans to begin her travels and research this upcoming spring.

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