Dr Virginia Mantouvalou

Chair

Virginia Mantouvalou is Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law at University College London (UCL). She works on legal and philosophical aspects of labour rights and other human rights. She has published extensively on the rights of domestic workers, workers’ exploitation, structural injustice, capabilities theory, privacy and free speech at work, protection from unfair dismissal, the right to work, the rights of undocumented workers, modern slavery. She is on the editorial board of the Stanford Studies in Human Rights, articles co-editor of the Modern Law Review, co-editor of the UK Labour Law Blog and the Studies in Law and Social Justice and was joint editor of Current Legal Problems. She has held visiting positions at Georgetown University Law Centre in Washington DC and the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

Her most recent co-edited book on the Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law (with Hugh Collins and Gillian Lester) was published by OUP in 2018. For her research, she has been funded through various awards, such as an AHRC grant and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She has also received the UCL Provost Public Engagement Award for her research with Kalayaan. She has worked as specialist advisor to the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights and as consultant for the ILO and the Council of Europe.

Alison Harvey

Trustee

Alison Harvey has returned to practice from the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association where she was General Secretary, then Legal Director.

She trains, lectures and writes widely on immigration, asylum, nationality and human rights law. She is a contributor to Fransman’s British Nationality Law and to Macdonald’s Immigration law and Practice.

She has worked in the UK and overseas, representing clients before the Home Office, tribunals and courts, including working at the Refugee Legal Centre, Asylum Aid, and South West Law. She has worked with refugees, the internally displaced and the trafficked for the UN in West Africa, Darfur and Azerbaijan. She has worked extensively on the development of immigration law and policy in the UK, advising those lobbying on, and challenging, a total of nine immigration Acts (to date) as well as on the development of the points-based system and the immigration aspects of Brexit. Recent training credits include ‘The Immigration Act 2016’, ‘Nationality Law is Fun’ and ‘Advanced Naturalisation’ for the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association and ‘Trafficking: identifying and assisting victims’ for Free Movement.

Alison is co-chair of the Trustees of Kalayaan and led in its work with its legal team for its intervention in the Supreme Court in the Reyes case.

Alison has been appointed Special Advisor to the Joint Committee on Human Rights for its enquiry Detention of Windrush Generation.

Silvia Hill

Co-Treasurer

Gabriel Ephraim

Co-Treasurer

Myriam Cherti

Trustee

Myriam Cherti is a National Officer at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) of the United Nations. Prior to that a she was a Senior Researcher at Oxford University’s COMPAS, where she worked four years. Her areas of expertise include irregular migration, migrant integration, diaspora politics and Moroccan migration. From 2009 to 2013, Myriam was Senior Researcher at the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IPPR) where she led several projects, including “Beyond Irregularity,” a major research program on irregular migration. Before that, she worked as a project coordinator at the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum, where she led a project on the oral history of the Moroccan diaspora in the UK. Myriam has also worked as a consultant and researcher on a number of European projects on the integration of ethnic minorities. Myriam holds a Master’s degree in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and a PhD in Migration Studies from the University of Sussex.

Natalie Sedacca

Trustee

Dr Natalie Sedacca is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter. Natalie’s PhD, completed in 2021 at University College London (UCL), analyses the legal position of domestic workers and their frequent exclusion from protective labour law legislation, criticising this exclusion based on human
rights standards. Her PhD includes case studies on Chile and the UK with empirical work in each.
Prior to joining Exeter, Natalie worked as a Teaching Fellow at UCL and Queen Mary University of London. Natalie has also been a Research Volunteer for Kalayaan, conducting interviews with domestic workers and co-writing the 2019 report Dignity, Not Destitution: The Impact of Differential Rights to Work for Migrant Domestic Workers’ with Avril Sharp. Before entering academia, Natalie spent nine years in legal ractice, including seven as a qualified solicitor, specialising in claims against the police and public authorities.

Pauline Uwins

Trustee

Pauline Uwins is an experienced Compliance Officer and Auditor within the financial services sector having worked at three of the largest Global and European banks . Her main areas of focus include mitigating conduct risk, promoting fair customer outcomes and identifying and investigating financial market abuse and money laundering. Her career has included managing operational and governance risk and she has prepared papers for Board and Audit Committees.

Hugh Collins

Trustee

Hugh Collins is the Cassel Professor of Commercial Law at the London School of Economics. Formerly he was the Vinerian Professor of English Law at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple. He studied law at the University of Oxford and Harvard Law School. One of his main areas of research and teaching is employment law. He has published several books in the field, including Employment Law 2nd edn (Oxford University Press), Labour Law 2nd edn (with KD Ewing and A. McColgan) (Cambridge University Press) and Justice in Dismissal (Oxford University Press). His most recent research has focussed on the law of indirect discrimination and also the impact of human rights law on the content and enforcement of employment law rights of workers.

Narmada Thiranagama

Trustee

Narmada is a national policy officer for UNISON, the UK’s largest trade union, working in the Policy and Public Affairs Unit for over 8 years. She leads on the union’s policy work on Employment Rights, Migrant workers, Policing, Probation and Justice, and tackling the far right. She has previously been UNISON’s national Race Equality Officer. Prior to working for UNISON, Narmada was the TUC’s national Women’s Officer. She holds a BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Narmada grew up in Sri Lanka and came to the UK as a child refugee.

Julieta Gadayan

Trustee

Julieta is a migrant domestic worker. Originally from the Philippines, she migrated abroad in order to support her family. She has experience in domestic work, including childcare, fashion and textiles, as well as retail experience at the Co-op. Julieta is currently working as a carer to a family in North London. She is keen to make sure Kalayaan is centring the experiences and needs of migrant domestic workers across their work and strategic objectives.