Warda Shazadi MeighenB.A.H., J.D., MSc.

Warda Shazadi Meighen has over a decade of experience and is recognized as a leading lawyer in Canada under 40 (Lexpert®). She is a creative and relentless advocate dedicated to high-quality service for each client. She holds a graduate degree from the University of Oxford where she focused on refugee, migration and international refugee law.

For several years, she has been an adjunct professor of refugee law at the University of Toronto.

Warda enjoys representing clients in all refugee and immigration matters – both simple and complex. Warda serves on the executive committee of Human Rights Watch Canada where she is the Co-Chair of the International Justice Circle. She is also the Co-Vice President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers.

Warda previously worked at Waldman & Associates, another leading immigration and refugee law firm. After graduating from law school, Warda articled at McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Toronto and worked as an attorney at Shearman & Sterling LLP in New York.

She has appeared as an expert before Parliamentary and Senate committees on issues relating to refugee and immigration law.

Warda previously worked on prosecutions in relation to the Rwandan genocide at the United Nations Tribunal for Rwanda.

Warda enjoys publishing academic work. Her recent work includes “An Analysis of Post-Ezokola and JS Jurisprudence on Exclusion”, Criminalization of Migration: Context and Consequences, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018 and a chapter entitled “Inadmissibility on Security-Related Grounds: a Reconsideration” in Serious International Crimes, Human Rights, and Forced Displacement, Routledge, 2022.

From 2015-2017, Warda served as the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration, where she co-managed a team of 10 editors tasked with publishing scholarship that reflects the global state of forced migration.

Warda is called to the bars of Ontario and New York.

She speaks English, Urdu, Hindi & Punjabi.