Fionnuala Ní Aoláin KC (Hons)

Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin KC (Hons) (Bluesky – LinkedIn – X) is Executive Editor at Just Security. She serves as Regents Professor and Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School and Professor of Law at the Queens University School of Law in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was appointed Honorary King’s Counsel in 2024. She was appointed as a member of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic by the Human Rights Council in 2025.  She has held visiting academic positions at Yale University, Harvard Law School, the Geneva Academy, Princeton University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

She has published extensively in the fields of emergency powers, conflict regulation, transitional justice and sex-based harms in times of war. Her books include Law in Times of Crisis (CUP 2006, awarded the ASIL’s Certificate of Merit for creative scholarship); On the Frontlines: Gender, War and the Post Conflict Process OUP (2011), and the Handbook on Gender and Conflict, OUP (2017). Ní Aoláin has a long career of public service including serving as a representative of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in Bosnia (1996-97); and appointment as Commissioner to the Irish Human Rights Commission (2000-2005), which was established following the Good Friday Peace Agreement. In 2003, she was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as Special Expert on promoting gender equality in times of conflict and peace-making); she was appointed Expert to UN Women and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on a Study addressing Reparations for conflict-related sexual violence (2011-2013); and was a court- appointed Expert to the International Criminal Court Trust Fund (2015). She chaired the International Women’s Program of the Open Society Fund from 2011-17. She has twice been nominated by the Irish government as Judge to the European Court of Human Rights.

Ní Aoláin served as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism from 2017-Nov 2023. She was elected to the International Commission of Jurists in 2023. She is an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy. She was appointed Honorary King’s Counsel in 2024. The rank of KC honoris causa is conferred by The King on the recommendation of the Lord Chancellor to lawyers who have made a major contribution to the law of England and Wales outside practice in the courts.

Areas of Expertise: Public International Law, Counter-Terrorism, Armed Conflict, Human Rights Law, International Criminal Law, International Women’s Rights, European Union Law.