We are delighted to announce the appointment of two new Honorary Titles to the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice:

Professor Brian Dooley – Honorary Professor of Practice

Professor Siobhán Mullally – Honorary Professor

Titles of Honorary Professor and Honorary Professors of Practice are awarded to recognise and reward the contribution of people of distinction to teaching, research and input through professional standing, to Queen’s University Belfast.

 

Professor Brian Dooley

Professor Brian Dooley is Senior Advisor at Washington DC-based NGO Human Rights First.  He works primarily with human rights defenders working in dangerous environments, including war zones, revolutions, or in repressive countries.

Much of his work in 2022/2023 has been in eastern Ukraine. 

He is a visiting scholar at University College, London (UCL) and 2020-2023 was Senior Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders.

He served for eight years as an advisory board member of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, and was a visiting scholar at John Jay College, City University of New York 2022-2023, and at Fordham University Law School, New York 2019–2020.

He regularly testifies at the U.S. Congress and other parliaments on human rights issues. 

He writes for and is interviewed by a range of international media regularly.

He previously led Amnesty International’s work on partnering with national NGOs in the global South and worked as Head of Media for Amnesty in London and in Dublin, and as director of communications for Public Citizen in Washington, D.C.

His work for Amnesty included being on research teams sent to conflicts in Lebanon 2006 and Gaza 2009, and on the ambassador of Conscience Award project for Nelson Mandela in 2005; he interned for Senator Edward Kennedy in the mid-80s as a legislative researcher, contributing to what ultimately became the 1986 Anti-Apartheid Act.

He lived and worked as an English teacher in a black township in South Africa from 1981–1982 in defiance of apartheid's racial segregation laws.  Other human rights work included helping establish Baltic Pride marches 2007–2010.

His work focuses on the practicalities of enabling and protecting the work of HRDs working in difficult and dangerous contexts.

Dooley holds a PhD in the history of civil rights from the University of East Anglia, an MPhil in Government and Politics from the Open University.

Publications include:

Robert Kennedy: The Final Years (Edinburgh University Press 1995, St Martin's Press, New York 1996), a political biography of Bobby Kennedy.

Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America (Pluto Press, 1998, reissued 2019) tracing historic links between the civil rights movements in Northern Ireland and the US.

Choosing the Green? (Beyond the Pale 2004) analysing the part played by the Irish diaspora in the Irish conflict.

 

Professor Siobhán Mullally

Professor Siobhán Mullally is the Established Professor of Human Rights Law and Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at University of Galway. In 2020, she was appointed as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, especially women and children.  This is the only exclusively focused international human rights mechanism for combating human trafficking.  The mandate has a global reach, and engages widely with law and policy forums, and with civil society.

Siobhán is the Principal Investigator of the Irish Research Council project on Human Trafficking, Forced Migration and Gender Equality in Uganda, a collaborative research programme with the Refugee Law Project, Makerere University.  She is the Senior Legal Expert for Ireland on FRANET, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency multidisciplinary research network.

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, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe) and international organisations in many parts of the world, including in Ethiopia, Timor-Leste, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kosovo.

She is the recipient of numerous research awards for work relating to gender equality, migration and refugee protection, human trafficking and migrant workers, including from the Irish Research Council, European Commission, Irish Aid, International Bar Association, Nuffield Foundation.

Professor Mullally’s research in the fields of gender, women’s rights, migration, asylum and multiculturalism has been published widely in leading journals including Human Rights Quarterly, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Modern Law Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, American Journal of Comparative Law, European Human Rights Law Review, Social and Legal Studies, Asian Yearbook of International Law.

Her books include:

Care Migration and Human Rights: Law and Pracitice (ed.) (Routledge: 2015);

Gender Culture and Human Rights: Reclaiming Universalism (Hart: 2006).

Published reports include:

A Child Rights Response to Child Migration and Migrant Children at Risk (International Bar Association: 2019)

Report into the Independence of the Judiciary in Pakistan (International Bar Association: 2007). 

Commenting on the appointments, Institute Director Professor Richard English said: 'We're delighted that Brian Dooley and Siobhán Mullally are joining the Mitchell Institute.  Professors Mullally and Dooley bring with them vital expertise in relation to human rights, and their contributions to the life and work of the Institute will be invaluable.'