Omar Yousef Shehabi is an international lawyer with research interests in international labour law, international dispute settlement, the law of international responsibility, the law of international organisations, and the laws of war. He is a doctoral (JSD) candidate at Yale Law School and a visiting professor of law at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, where he teaches public international law, administrative law, statutes and regulations (legislation and regulation), professional responsibility, international labour law, and United Nations law and practice.

Omar was previously an acting assistant professor at New York University School of Law. Before law teaching, Omar served in various roles with the United Nations between 2013 and 2023. He most recently served as a legal officer with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, in the international law section of its Department of Legal Affairs, having previously worked in the agency’s West Bank and Gaza field legal offices. From 2020 to 2022, Omar was a legal officer with the United Nations Office of Administration of Justice, where he represented staff members before the United Nations Dispute Tribunal and Appeals Tribunal. He has provided technical assistance to Palestinian negotiators in permanent-status negotiations with Israel and has participated in drafting high-level documents related to the Question of Palestine. He has provided expert testimony before various high-level bodies and to members of the US House and Senate, German Bundestag, and European Parliament.

Prior to the UN, Omar worked as a labour lawyer, representing trade unions, employers, and employee benefit funds. His practice included litigation, arbitration, negotiation of collective labor contracts, internal investigations, industrial relations strategy, and employment law compliance.

Recent Publications

Shorter Works

Works in Progress

  • Wage Labour and Foreign Capital: Industrial Relations in International Investment Law

    The now-ubiquitous concept of responsible business conduct in foreign investment encompasses compliance with internationally recognised standards in human rights, indigenous rights, environmental protection, and labour. While the treatment of human rights, indigenous rights and environmental protection in investment law has generated considerable scholarship, the interplay of investment law and labour has not. This Article is the first to consider the interplay of international investment law and collective labour law: the law regulating the relationship between workers, employers, their representatives, and the state.

         Whereas investment arbitrators have been criticised for avoiding claims and defences grounded in human rights law, the Article illustrates that investment arbitrators rarely recognise the collective labour law dimensions of the investment claims before them. The Article analyses investment cases in which investors allege that the host state violated its investment treaty obligations of fair and equitable treatment (FET) and full protection and security (FPS) through its intervention or non-intervention in strikes, worker demonstrations, boycotts, and other industrial action. In none of these cases do the tribunals refer to principles of labour law in assessing the lawfulness of the industrial action or the propriety of the state intervention or non-intervention. Thus, where tribunals have concluded that investors should have anticipated and handled industrial action without state intervention, they have done so based on notions of investor fault for unpaid wages, sudden layoffs, etc., rather than the right to strike as it exists in international law or the law of the host state. Similarly, where investors allege that state efforts to resolve labour disputes constitute ‘collusion’ with trade unions, tribunals have looked exclusively to the law of state responsibility, without considering what role labour law ascribes to the state in resolving such disputes. This analysis shows that investment arbitrators largely decide FET and FPS claims involving questions of labour relations ex aequo et bono instead of looking to collective labour law.

        The Article predicts that the reform agenda in investment law will not change this insensitivity to collective labour law. These reforms respond to a prevailing vision of human rights wherein the procedural, communitarian principles that create the conditions for trade unionism and industrial democracy are devalorised and subordinated to property rights, the speech and associational rights of corporations and union objectors, and a vision of non-discrimination geared towards equal competition for prosperity.

Teaching

  • Administrative Law; Statutes and Regulations; United Nations: Law and Practice, McGeorge School of Law, Spring 2025

  • Public International Law; Professional Responsibility, University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, Fall 2024

  • United Nations: Law and Practice, University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, Spring 2024

  • Lawyering, NYU School of Law, 2023-24 (full-year course)

  • International Labour Law, University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, Fall 2022

Lectures & Presentations

  • No Alternative to Despair?: Sahrawis, Palestinians and the International Law of Nationalism, Middle East Studies Association annual meeting, Denver, USA, December 2021

  • Emerging Technologies, Digital Privacy, and Data Protection in Military Occupation, at The Rights to Privacy and Data Protection in Times of Armed Conflict book project conference, Indiana University Europe Gateway, Berlin, Germany, 8-9 October 2021

  • The F-Word in Middle East Constitutional Discourse: Federalism and Decentralization as Frameworks for Self-Determination in the Middle East and North Africa (with Aslı Ü. Bâli, Sujit Choudhry, and Omar M. Dajani), American Society of Comparative Law Annual Meeting, UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, USA, 16 October 2020

  • Wage Labor and Foreign Capital: Industrial Relations in International Investment Law, Conference of the Postgraduate and Early Professionals/Academics Network of the Society of International Economic Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 18 May 2020

  • Wage Labor and (Transnational) Capital: Industrial Relations in International Economic Law, Yale Law School Graduate Works-in-Progress Symposium, New Haven, USA, 8 April 2020 

  • Dans ses frontières authentiques?: Morocco’s advanced regionalisation and the question of Western Sahara,
    Middle East Studies Association, New Orleans, USA, 14-17 November 2019

  • Permanence in International Law and Protracted Territorial Conflicts, American Society of International Law Midyear Meeting, New York, USA, 7-9 November 2019