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Fionnuala Ní Aoláin KC (Hons)

Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin KC (Hons) (Bluesky – LinkedInTwitter/X) is Executive Editor at Just Security. She is 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 is Faculty Director of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Minnesota Law School.  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.

 

Articles by this author:

A member of the Army National Guard checks his phone at a COVID-19 drive-thru testing site on April 20, 2020 in Brooklyn, New York.
General Assembly Seventy-second session, 101st plenary meeting
A migrant man embraces her daughter after taking to Turkish Coast Guard's unit 901 boat fallowing a rescue operation on the Aegean Sea between Turkish resort town of Bodrum and the Greek island of Kos following a rescue operation by the Turkish Coast Guard on November 15, 2019 in Bodrum, Turkey.
Sara al-Abdullah, a volunteer caring for 24 orphaned children reportedly linked with foreign fighters of the Islamic State (IS) group, carries one of them at a camp in the northern Syrian village of Ain Issa, on September 26, 2019.
Security Council meeting on Threats to international peace and security.
A girl stands crying at al-Hol camp for displaced people in al-Hasakeh governorate in northeastern Syria on July 22, 2019, as people collect UN-provided humanitarian aid packages around her.
US army elite team members participate in the 2011 Commando Forces competition in San Salvador, on June 21, 2011.
Fully veiled women and children walk in the northern Kuridish-Syrian city of Qamishli as Uzbek women and children linked to the Islamic State group are handed over to diplomats from the Central Asian country for repatriation, on May 29, 2019.
Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and Iraqi human rights activist Nadia Murad Basee Taha attend a United Nations Security Council meeting at U.N. headquarters, April 23, 2019 in New York City.
Murdered women’s shoes are seen during a demonstration demanding justice for the 5.929 women killed in the past 15 years in Honduras, in the framework of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women which was commemorated on the eve worldwide, in Tegucigalpa, on November 26, 2018.
Trump speaks during his visit to US Border Patrol McAllen Station in McAllen, Texas, on January 10, 2019.

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