Close
Brian Dooley is a Visiting Scholar at the UCL Global Governance Institute (GGI).
Biography
Brian Dooley PhD is an author and human rights consultant specialising in issues of transnational civil rights and Human Rights Defenders working conflict. He is currently Senior Advisor to the US-based NGO Human Rights First, and was for several years Senior Advisor to United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, Mary Lawlor. For 16 years he held a variety of posts at Amnesty International, including on research teams in Lebanon during the 2006 war and the Gaza conflict in 2008/09. He has written several books on political identity and civil rights, and has long experience in advocating on Human Rights Defender issues, including testifying in various European parliaments and in the US Congress, writing and commentating for, and appearing on, international media including the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, and Al Jazeera. He was a Visiting Scholar 2019/20 at the Law School of Fordham University, New York. He has authored dozens of reports on Human Rights Defender issues following in-country research in countries including Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Hungary, Kenya, Ukraine, and The United Arab Emirates. Recent research includes writing public reports from the eastern front in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and on British State impunity during the Northern Ireland conflict.
Research interests
My research increasingly focuses on where governments, businesses, and the UN system are succeeding and failing to protect Human Rights Defenders (HRDs). Specific areas of interest include HRDs operating in revolutions and war zones, and in dictatorships. Working with UCL colleagues I aim to produce practical assessments of protection mechanisms, and I engage closely with the UCL Global Governance Institute, as well as the MA in Human Rights programme at the Department of Political Science to both share expertise from the perspective of a practitioner and to learn from the students’ research and experience.
