Delphine Nakache

Delphine Nakache is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Law, French Common Law Section, at the University of Ottawa. She is also a lawyer and member of the Law Society of Ontario. She holds a University Research Chair on Migrant Protection and International Law. Her teaching and publications focus on international public law, constitutional law (division of powers), and immigration, refugee and citizenship law. Her research, empirical and collaborative, looks at migrants with precarious status (migrant workers, non-status migrants, asylum seekers, etc.) and marginalized immigrants, and deals with the concept of “vulnerable migrant” in national and international legal instruments.  She regularly engages with government and civil society representatives on these topics and acts as a consultant for government and intergovernmental institutions.

Professor Nakache has led the Precarious Migration Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2018–2025), which is nearing completion. It studies the multitude of legal statuses held by temporary migrants in Canada and explores why and how migrants move in and out of authorized legal status (with co-researchers Idil Atak, Jason Foster and Luin Goldring). She recently completed work leading the Canadian research section of the VULNER project (2020–2024), an international initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 870845 (Canadian section co-researchers: Dagmar Soennecken and François Crépeau; collaborators: Nathan Benson, James Milner and Anna Purkey). She is also a co-researcher for a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Partnership Development Grant, 2018–2025) titled "Civil society and the global refugee regime: understanding and enhancing impact through the implementation of global refugee policy". For this project, under Principal Investigator James Milner (a Carleton University professor), she is leading the working group on “Protection”, in collaboration with Nathan Beson from the Refugee Hub.