RSC Seminar, 20 November 2019
Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2019
Series convenors: Professor Matthew J Gibney, Professor Cathryn Costello, Professor Tom Scott-Smith
About the speaker
Siobhán Mullally is Established Professor of Human Rights Law and Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway. She has published widely in the fields of gender, women’s rights, migration, asylum and multiculturalism. She is currently the President of the Council of Europe anti-trafficking body, the Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking (GRETA). She is a Commissioner with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, and is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, The Hague. She is the founding Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Irish Yearbook of International Law (with Professor Fiona de Londras), published by Hart Bloomsbury, Oxford.
Prior to her appointment at NUI Galway, she held a Chair (Full Professorship) in Law at University College Cork, where she was also Vice-Head of the College of Business and Law, and Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights. She has also held lecturing positions in the UK and Pakistan, and has held visiting positions at several universities in the U.S. (Harvard Law School, Columbia University, Cornell University, Emory University, Temple University), Australia (Sydney University - School of Law), Canada (Osgoode Hall, University of York, Toronto), Pakistan (University of Peshawar) and India (Bangalore - National Law School of India University). In 2009-10, she was a Fulbright Scholar and Senior Fellow in Residence at Columbia University, School of Law. In 2011-12, she was awarded the prestigious Senior Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence.
Professor Mullally has worked as an adviser and consultant on human rights, migration and asylum law, gender and justice sector reform for UN bodies (including UNIFEM, UNDP and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and international organisations in many parts of the world, including in Ethiopia, Timor-Leste, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kosovo. In 2009, she was appointed by the International Bar Association to an Inquiry team, examining the Independence of the Judiciary in Pakistan. Professor Mullally was the Director of a British Council program on Women and Human Rights Law with the University of Peshawar, Pakistan, from 1993-96, and from 2003-6. She led the development of the first taught LLM programme in Pakistan, launched at the University of Peshawar in 1992.
Professor Mullally served as Chairperson of the Irish Refugee Council from 2006-8 and served on the Board of Directors of NASC, the Irish Immigrant Support Centre from 2010-2013. She is the Irish Member of the Odysseus European network of experts on Asylum and Migration Law. Siobhán was previously the Irish member of the EU Network of Experts on Free Movement of Persons. She is a Global Faculty Affiliate of the Vulnerability and the Human Condition initiative at Emory University, School of Law, USA.
Photo: A Syrian refugee teaches Arabic through NaTakallam via Skype from Beirut. © UNHCR/Diego Ibarra Sanchez