Siobhan Mullally

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 by the UN Human Rights Council as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, especially women and children, reporting to both the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly. In 2022, she was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA). She is also an Honorary Professor at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast.

From 2017 to 2019, Professor Mullally was President of the Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA), and previously served as First Vice-President (2015–17) and Member (2013–19). She was a Commissioner with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (2014–19) and a member of the Joint Committee of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission established under the Good Friday Agreement. She is a member of the National Group of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and was the founding Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Irish Yearbook of International Law (2006–20), published by Hart Bloomsbury, Oxford.

Professor Mullally is a member of the Department of Foreign Affairs Standing Committee on Human Rights and of the Expert Advisory Panel on Ireland’s membership of the UN Security Council. In 2019, she was appointed to the Strategic Human Rights Advisory Committee of An Garda Síochána and previously served on the Research Advisory Group of the Department of Justice and Equality.

She was the Principal Investigator of the Irish Research Council project Human Trafficking, Forced Migration and Gender Equality in Uganda, a collaborative programme with the Refugee Law Project at Makerere University. She was also Principal Investigator and Senior Legal Expert for Ireland on FRANET, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s multidisciplinary research network. She has supervised 25 PhD students to completion, many of whom secured prestigious external scholarships, and has supervised several postdoctoral fellows and numerous Master’s students. Her former PhD students now hold senior roles in academia, international courts and organisations, and in public policy.

Siobhán Mullally has published extensively in the fields of migration, the rights of migrant workers, refugee protection, gender, women’s rights and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in leading journals including the Modern Law Review, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Human Rights Quarterly, American Journal of Comparative Law, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, European Public Law, Legal Studies, Public Law, International Journal of Law in Context and the Asian Yearbook of International Law. Her books include Gender, Culture and Human Rights: Reclaiming Universalism and Care, Migration and Human Rights: Law and Practice.

Before joining University of Galway, she held a Chair in Law at University College Cork, where she was Vice-Head of the College of Business and Law, Chair of the University Equality Committee and founding Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights. She served as Vice-Chair of the Institutional Self-Assessment Team for UCC’s first successful Athena Swan Bronze Award. She has held lecturing positions in the UK and Pakistan, and visiting positions at numerous universities including Sciences Po Paris, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Emory, Temple, Sydney, York, Toronto, Peshawar, the National Law School of India (Bangalore) and Symbiosis Law School (India).

In 2009–10, Professor Mullally was a Fulbright Scholar and Senior Fellow in Residence at the Center for Gender, Sexuality and Law at Columbia Law School. In 2011–12, she was awarded the Senior Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence.

She has worked as an adviser and consultant on human rights, migration and asylum law, and gender and justice sector reform for UN bodies including UNIFEM, UNDP, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Council of Europe. She has undertaken assignments in Ethiopia, Timor-Leste, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kosovo. In 2009, she was appointed to the International Bar Association Inquiry Team examining the independence of the judiciary in Pakistan, and in 2019 her report on the rights of migrant children was published by the IBA and presented at its World Congress in Seoul.

Professor Mullally directed a British Council programme on Women and Human Rights Law with the University of Peshawar from 1993 to 1996 and from 2003 to 2006. She led the development of Pakistan’s first taught LLM programme, launched at the University of Peshawar in 1992. She served as Chairperson of the Irish Refugee Council from 2006 to 2008 and was a founding Director of NASC, the Migrant and Refugee Rights Centre, serving on its Board from 2010 to 2013.

She is the Irish member of the Odysseus Network of European experts on asylum and migration law, and was previously Ireland’s 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.

Siobhán Mullally holds a PhD from the European University Institute, an LLM from the London School of Economics and a BCL from University College Cork. She also holds a Certificate in Teaching International Human Rights Law from the Institut des Droits de l’Homme in Strasbourg.