Younous Arbaoui is Assistant Professor of Migration Law at the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law (ACMRL), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he leads the Global Migration Law Hub. His research and teaching focus on the interaction between global migration governance instruments—particularly the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) and the UN Migrant Workers Convention (ICRMW)—with special attention to developments in the EU and North Africa. He is actively involved in the travaux préparatoires of General Comments of the UN Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW), and was instrumental in establishing a formal partnership between ACMRL and the CMW through a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at strengthening academic engagement with labour migration governance. He currently leads the Global Rights-Making Network, an international initiative that supports the preparation of shadow reports on migrant workers' rights to accompany state submissions to UN treaty bodies.
Arbaoui’s academic path began in the early 2000s, when he combined his work as a primary school teacher with legal studies at the University of Marrakech. After earning a bachelor's degree in public law, he moved to Amsterdam in 2004 to study Dutch, international, and European law. He defended his socio-legal PhD in 2019 on the dilemma of doing justice, through law, to individual freedoms without compromising family life, and vice versa—a study conducted within the Migration Law as a Family Matter project.
In addition to his academic work, Arbaoui is rédacteur en chef of Revue Hijra, an interdisciplinary journal on migration law and policy. He is also chair of the Clinique Juridique Hijra in Morocco, which he founded to provide legal aid to asylum seekers and train a new generation of migration lawyers in the region. He serves as secretary of the Migration Law Clinic Amsterdam, coordinating clinical legal education for law students engaged in real-world migration cases.
