Advisory Committee

Andrew Kaldor AM has been an independent businessman since staring his first company in 1980. He is now an investor.  He has been a Director of a number of publicly listed companies, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and other community organisations.  He has commissioned many works by Australian composers for the SSO and other music groups. In 2013 he was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the arts.  He holds a Bachelor of Economics (Honours) from the University of Sydney and an MBA (Dean’s Honours list) from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a teaching fellow.  Mr Kaldor and his immediate family were accepted by Australia as refugees after the second world war.  He and his wife, Renata Kaldor, founded the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law in 2013 at UNSW Sydney.

Renata Kaldor is Chair of the City Recital Hall, Angel Place, and serves on the Board of the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network. She is also on the Advisory Boards of the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law (UNSW); Heads Over Heels; and the NSW Alzheimer’s Association. She was previously a Trustee of the Sydney Opera House; Judicial Commissioner of NSW; the Deputy Chancellor of the University of Sydney; Board member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Chair of Women’s Advisory Council of NSW; Board Director of NSW State Rail Authority; Director of the Garvan Foundation; Director of Public Interest Law Clearing House and has held positions on a number of companies and community organisations associated with education, business and law. Renata has a Bachelor’s degree in Arts and a Diploma of Education from the University of NSW. She received her Officer of the Order of Australia in 2002 and a Centenary Medal 2003. She became an Honorary Fellow of the University of Sydney in 2005.

Kate Eastman AM SC is a leading Sydney barrister with expertise in human rights, discrimination, employment, public and constitutional law. She was appointed Senior Counsel in 2012 and is currently head of Six St James Chambers. She has appeared in many significant public law and human rights matters in the High Court of Australia. Kate is chair of the Australia Bar Association’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee; a member of the Law Council of Australia’s Business and Human Rights Working Group; and a member of the Law Council of Australia’s National Human Rights Committee.  She was the co-founder, and for many years President, of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights (ALHR).  Between 1995–98, she was a Senior Legal Officer with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission). Kate holds aDiploma of International Human Rights Law from the European University Institute, Florence Italy; a Master of Laws from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS); a Master of Laws with distinction from the University College London; and a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Laws from UNSW Sydney. She has taught at UTS, Monash University and the University of Sydney, and in a number of international programs. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Western Sydney and Senior Fellow and member of the Postgraduate Advisory Committee at Monash University’s Master of Human Rights Law program.

Adrian Edwards is UNHCR’s Canberra-based regional representative since April 2021, with geographical responsibilities for Australia, the Cook Islands, the Republic of Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Kiribati, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, the Republic of Palau, the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, the Independent State of Samoa, the Solomon Islands, the Kingdom of Tonga, Tuvalu and the Republic of Vanuatu.

Adrian has been with UNHCR since 2009 including as Spokesperson and Head of Global News & Media, and as Representative in Montenegro. In his earlier UN career he worked in Afghanistan with the UN political mission UNAMA, in Timor-Leste with UNMIT, in Sudan with the UN-AU Hybrid mission in Darfur, and in Cambodia where he was a political violence analyst for OHCHR.

Adrian has a background in human rights policy and analysis, and in journalism in the Asia-Pacific, having worked among others with the Far Eastern Economic Review, Reuters, the Economist Intelligence Unit and in South Korea as a radio and TV correspondent for the BBC.

Adrian is British-Swedish. He studied public administration at Harvard, and music in London. He is married to journalist Huongly Buiduong.

Shuja Jamal is a policy researcher and former senior Afghan civil servant. He is the author, with Professor William Maley, of The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Shuja served as the director-general for international relations and regional cooperation at the Afghan National Security Council, where he helped manage Afghanistan’s security partnerships. He also served as director for peace and civilian protection and handled Afghanistan’s policy portfolio on international sanctions, including those of the UN Security Council and the US against Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

Prior to his civil service work, he was a researcher for Human Rights Watch and served as director for development at the American University of Afghanistan, helping to reopen the university after the devastating terrorist attack on campus in August 2016.

Shuja currently serves as the head of policy, advocacy and communications at Jesuit Refugee Service Australia. He comes to this role after serving as a special advisor to the CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia.

He is a Fulbright recipient and has a master’s in public policy from Georgetown University.

Dr. Loughry serves on the Governing Committee of the International Catholic Migration Committee (ICMC) and is on the advisory committees of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, University of New South Wales, and the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, University of Melbourne. She is presently researching the psychosocial effects of climate-induced displacement in the Pacific.

LLB (Hons), LLM (QUT), PhD (UNSW)

Professor Andrew Lynch is Dean at UNSW Law & Justice. He has previously served as Head of School and Deputy Dean of the Law School. He teaches and researches in the field of Australian constitutional law. His research concentrates on the topics of federalism, judicial dissent, judicial appointments reform, and legal responses to terrorism. He is an author of Equity and Trusts (2001 and 2005), What Price Security? Taking Stock of Australia’s Anti-Terror Laws (2006), Inside Australia’s Anti-terrorism Laws and Trials (2014), Blackshield & Williams’ Australian Constitutional Law and Theory (6th ed, 2014; 7th ed, 2018) and Australia's Greatest Judicial Crisis - The Tim Carmody Affair (2016). He is a co-editor of Law and Liberty in the War on Terror (2007), Counter-Terrorism and Beyond: The Culture of Law and Justice After 9/11 (2010), Tomorrow’s Federation: Reforming Australian Government (2012) and the editor of Great Australian Dissents (2016).

Between 2008-2013, Andrew was the Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at UNSW and he continues to work on research housed within the Centre’s Judiciary Project.

Dr Penelope (Pene) Mathew is the President and Human Rights Commissioner, ACT Human Rights Commission. She has worked on human rights issues throughout her career, both as an academic and as a lawyer, working with human rights organizations, NGOs and with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as an independent expert in refugee law. Dr Mathew was Dean at both Griffith University and The University of  Auckland and has held positions at The University of Melbourne, The Australian National University and Michigan Law School.

Jaguar Ngo is an undergraduate student at the University of Queensland with provisional entry into a Doctor of Medicine degree. He represented Queensland as part of the state debating team, and together with his brother, Eagle Ngo, they were the first Vietnamese Australians to be awarded Dux of Brisbane Boys Grammar.

Jaguar Ngo is a second-generation Vietnamese-Australian, whose grandparents were accepted by Australia as refugees as a result of the Vietnam War. Inspired by the generosity and kindness shown by the Australian community towards the Ngo family, Jaguar committed himself to giving back.

As a volunteer tutor, he has focused on raising the literacy skills of new refugee children. He has also been involved in raising awareness for patients through the Fred Hollows Foundation and Scleroderma United.

His family are business owners and legal practitioners in Brisbane and has been heavily involved in the settlement of Vietnamese refugees in Australia.

Leanne Smith was appointed Chief Executive of the Commission in November 2021. She was most recently Executive Director of the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University from 2017-2021. Leanne is an international human rights lawyer by training, with a Masters in Public Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Leanne has worked in the Australian judicial system, for the Australian Human Rights Commission, in the international NGO sector, for regional human rights organisations, as an Australian diplomat (DFAT),  and in various roles for the United Nations in New York, most recently as Chief of Policy and Best Practices for UN Peacekeeping Operations and in the field from Afghanistan, to the Balkans, to Africa and Southeast Asia. Leanne has published a number of articles on Australian foreign policy and international human rights, the rule of law and development, as well as the United Nations and women, peace and security. She is an Adjunct Fellow at the Western Sydney University School of Law, a visiting fellow at the ANU Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy and the UNSW Australian Human Rights Centre, Co-Chair of the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights Women and Girls Rights Subcommittee, a member of the Australian Republic Movement National Committee and a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association of Australia.