Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin Appointed a Member of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic
Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin has been appointed a member of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. The President of the UN Human Rights Council, Ambassador Jürg Lauber (Switzerland), has appointed University of Minnesota Law School Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (Republic of Ireland) and Monia Ammar to serve as members of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. They join Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (Brazil), who has served as chair of the Commission since it was established.
The Commission of Inquiry on Syria was established in August 2011 by the Human Rights Council with resolution S-17/1. The mandate of the Commission is to investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law since March 2011 in the Syrian Arab Republic and to present public reports on its findings.
The Human Rights Council also tasked the Commission with establishing the facts and circumstances that may amount to such violations and of the crimes perpetrated and, where possible, to identify those responsible with a view to ensuring that perpetrators of violations, including those that may constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes, are held accountable.
The Human Rights Council has repeatedly extended the Commission's mandate since then, most recently for an additional year through resolution 58/25, which was adopted in April 2025.
In 2025, Ní Aoláin was elected a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She was also named a Fellow of the British Academy, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences, and she was named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for the 2025-26 academic year in the Fulbright-Schuman European Union Affairs Program. In 2023, she was elected to the International Commission of Jurists, and in 2024, she received a lifetime appointment as Honorary King's Counsel (KC Hon) by His Majesty King Charles III of the United Kingdom.
Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin KC (Hons) is a University of Minnesota Regents Professor, the Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society, and faculty director of Minnesota Law's Human Rights Center. She is concurrently a professor of law at Queen's University of Belfast, School of Law. In 2017, Professor Ní Aoláin was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. In this capacity, she worked closely with states and United Nations entities to advance human rights protections in some of the most challenging contexts globally. She was re-elected for an additional three-year term in 2020, which ended in November 2023.
Read the press release from the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner
