Fionnuala Ní Aoláin

Regents Professor and Robina Professor of Law, Public Policy and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School and Professor of Law at the Queens University, School of Law, Belfast

Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is concurrently Regents Professor and Robina Professor of Law, Public Policy and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School and Professor of Law at the Queens University, School of Law, Belfast.  Professor Ní Aoláin is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors including the Leverhulme Fellowship, Fulbright scholarship, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann Scholarship, a European Commission award, and the Lawlor fellowship. She has published extensively in the fields of emergency powers, conflict regulation, transitional justice and sex based violence in times of war. Her book Law in Times of Crisis (CUP 2006) was awarded the American Society of International Law’s preeminent prize in 2007 - the Certificate of Merit for creative scholarship. Her book On the Frontlines: Gender, War and the Post Conflict Process was published by Oxford University Press (2011). Another book Exceptional Courts and Military Commissions in Comparative Perspective was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press (with Gross).  She recently edited the Oxford Handbook on Gender and Conflict (2017).  She has published extensively on issues of gender and international law.

Professor Ní Aoláin received her LL.B. and Ph.D. in law at the Queen's University Law Faculty in Belfast and also holds an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School (1993-94); an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School (1994-96); a Visiting Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (1996-2000); an associate Professor of Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel (1997-99); a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University (2001-02), Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2011-2012) and Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School (2012-13).

Professor Ní Aoláin is currently the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism (3-year appointment).  Previously, she was a representative of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in Bosnia (1996-97). 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. In 2011, she was appointed as consultant jointly by the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and UN WOMEN to prepare a Study on Reparations for Conflict Related Sexual Violence. Ní Aoláin has been nominated twice (2004 and 2007) by the Irish government to the European Court of Human Rights, the first woman and the first academic lawyer to be thus nominated. She was appointed by the Irish Minister of Justice to the Irish Human Rights Commission in 2000 and served until 2005. She remains an elected member of the Executive Committee for the Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice, and is also a member of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. In 2010 she was elected to a three-year term on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and in 2014 she co-chaired the 108th Annual Meeting of the ASIL and the 76th Biennial of the International Law Association.  She is chair of the International Women’s Program Board at the Open Society Foundations (since 2010).