Aoife Nolan

Aoife Nolan is an Irish human rights lawyer who is Professor of International human rights law at the University of Nottingham. She is President of the Council of Europe's European Committee of Social Rights, the leading European monitoring mechanism on economic and social rights, having joined the Committee in 2017 and served as vice-president in 2021-2. She is an academic expert at Doughty Street Chambers where she co-leads the Children's Rights Group and sits on the Steering Group of Doughty Street International. She has led international research projects and acted as an expert advisor to a wide range of international and national organisations and bodies working on human rights issues, including UN entities, the Council of Europe, the World Bank, multiple NHRIs and NGOs, as well as governments. In addition to her academic role at Nottingham, she is currently a visiting professor at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE, and at Ulster University. In 2025, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts on the basis of her "world-leading expertise and practice on the rights of children, especially in relation to the socio-economic impacts of poverty and cost of living". In June 2026, she was elected to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, following nomination for membership by the Government of Ireland.

Education Nolan studied law at Trinity College Dublin, graduating with a LLB, and undertook her doctorate at the EUI. She completed her PGCHET at Queen's University, Belfast. Career

From 2010 to 2012, she worked at Durham University, having spent 2006–2010 at Queen's University, Belfast, where her work included leading a ground-breaking project on human rights and budgets. is a Council member of Child Rights International Network (CRIN) and was a founding trustee of Just Fair. She was academic lead of the interdisciplinary Children and Childhood Network and hosted the Nottingham Summer School on Child Rights. During 2015-2018, her work co-leading the UoN Rights and Justice Research Priority Area involved over 700 members from 22 different university centres. In July 2021, she was elected to the University of Nottingham Senate.

Research Nolan's publications include works on human rights, economic and social rights and children's rights, and constitutional law. won the IALT Kevin Boyle Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Birks Book Prize. She is on the editorial board of the Human Rights Law Review, International Human Rights Law Review and, formerly, the International Journal of Children's Rights.

In 2018, Nolan was involved in drafting the Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education. In 2019-20, she served on the Scottish Government's Child Rights Working Group, creating a model which included the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child within Scots Law.

She led a major international study on the theory and practice of children's rights strategic litigation, the Advancing Child Rights Strategic Litigation (ACRiSL) project. This research collaboration, involving partners from across Africa, Asia and Europe, developed a ground-breaking model of child rights consistent strategic litigation, which has been widely applied internationally, including by the Commission for Children and Young People in Scotland and the Children's Commissioner for Jersey.

She served on the Steering Group of the British Academy's Childhood Policy Programme from 2020 to 2022. In 2021 she was elected to the executive committee of the Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI). and the 2023 'cost of living crisis' on human rights.

Personal life In 2015, Nolan married Conor Gearty (also a human rights lawyer) who died on 11 September 2025.

Selected publications Children's Socio-economic Rights, Democracy and the Courts (2011) Economic and Social Rights After the Global Financial Crisis (2014) Children's Rights Strategic Litigation Toolkit (2022)