E. Tendayi Achiume is the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, a Professor of Law at University of California Lons Angeles, and a Research Associate of the African Center for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Her research and teaching interests lie in international human rights law, international refugee law, international migration and property. The current focus of her work is the global governance of racism and xenophobia; and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism for contemporary international migration.More generally, her research and teaching interests lie in international human rights law, international refugee law, international migration, and property.

Achiume earned her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. While at law school, she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Development Studies from Yale.

Following her graduation, she served as a law clerk for Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke and Justice Yvonne Mokgoro on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Thereafter, as Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow, she represented refugees and migrants at Lawyers for Human Rights in Johannesburg, while teaching on the faculty of the International Human Rights Exchange Programme based at the University of the Witwatersrand. Prior to her current appointment at UCLA, she was a litigation associate at the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell and a Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA School of Law. She is also a graduate of the United World College of the Atlantic.

Her publications include: ‘Migration as Decolonization’, Stanford Law Review; ‘Governing Xenophobia’, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law; ‘Syria, Cost-Sharing and the Responsibility to Protect Refugees’, Minnesota Law Review; and ‘Beyond Prejudice: Structural Xenophobic Discrimination Against Refugees’, Georgetown Journal of International Law.