Guest Lecture

Speaker Name: Professor Brian Dooley, Human Rights First
 
Topic: Researching Human Rights in a War Zone

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.

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.

This event will take place in-person on Thursday 11 April 2024 at 12:30pm in the Moot Court (MST.02.006)