Aisling Reidy

Aisling Reidy has served as senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch since 2006, focusing on Europe and Central Asia, the Americas, and several African states. She has taught international humanitarian law and human rights law at a university level.

Previously, Reidy, an Irish Barrister, was the director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. She also worked in The Hague as a trial lawyer in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. During her career, Reidy has litigated multiple cases before the European Court of Human Rights and has appeared on behalf of Turkey’s Kurdish victims of rights violations. Immediately after the Kosovo War, she worked in Kosovo as senior human rights analyst for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, where amongst other responsibilities she worked with families of the “disappeared” as the head of a victim identification and recovery program. 

She is a fellow of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, in the United Kingdom, and was a senior research fellow at University College London. She holds a law degree from the National University of Ireland and a master’s in international human rights law from University of Essex.