Shabina Begum

Described as an “exceptional lawyer” and a “pioneer in her field“, Shabina is featured in Management Today’s “35 Women Under 35, 2020 ” List of Britain’s Brightest Young Business Leaders.

Shabina is a UN recognised authority on child, early and forced marriage. She is an expert in domestic violence, honour based violence, forced marriage, stranded spouse and female genital mutilation cases; and additionally has specialism in children disputes, divorce and financial orders with expertise in Shariah law; both family law and Islamic financing. She has worked as an Independent Domestic Violence Advocate handling high risk cases and extremely vulnerable clients.

Shabina leads the way in researching and championing the rights of women and girls.  She graduated with a LL.B from Greenwich University and completed her LL.M at Cornell University. She was awarded the Blackstone Entrance Exhibition Award and the Lord Lowry Scholarship by the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple in 2008. She was called to the Bar in 2009. In 2012 she was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship enabling her to travel to Sri Lanka, Cambodia and India to conduct legal research on the issue of acid violence. In 2013 was admitted as a solicitor. That same year, she was selected by the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies’ to participate in the Young Muslim Leadership Programme; a forum for young British Muslims with strong leadership potential to come together and consider key issues affecting British society. In 2014, she was awarded a Churchill Fellow Medallion, by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, for her research. 

She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2017 to undertake research on child and forced marriage in the USA. She conducted this research as part of her postgraduate studies at Cornell Law School in 2018.

Shabina is now a part time lecturer in law and teaches Sex & Gender in the Legal Process at the University of Buckingham and Advocacy & Professional Ethics at the University of Greenwich.

A regular speaker at conferences and seminars, in 2013 she spoke at the Feminism in London conference and was interviewed by the Feminist Times. She has delivered an online seminar in the European Family Justice Observatory on acid violence and has also made a TV appearance on “Live the Life” on Islam Channel to speak about the topic. In 2016 she was invited to speak in New York at the 16th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, held by United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. As a UN recognised expert on child, early and forced marriage she was invited by the UN in 2016 to participate as an expert in Geneva. She runs specialist training sessions for NGOs on forced marriage, child marriage, FGM and other related topics like stranded spouses and dowry violence.

She speaks fluent Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. She is also a certified user of Level 1 British Sign Language.