Professor Siobhan Mullally is the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children and she also supervised Andrew Forde when he was studying for his PhD. She spoke at the launch of his book.

“I really can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed and learned from this experience of supervising Andrew’s work and from engaging with him from the time of his doctoral research,” she said.

“Andrew proposes a new approach to assess how the European Convention on Human Rights and Council of Europe as a whole can better serve the millions of people now located in so-called gray zones where significant protection gaps arise and there is limited access to justice,” she said.

Prof Mullally said his book was now “critically important” and she was not surprised when Cambridge University press “literally snapped it up”.

“When he submitted his doctoral thesis in November 2020 we couldn’t have imagined how urgent and timely the issues addressed would become – for the Council of Europe, for our system of multi-lateralism, for peace, democracy and human rights protection,” she said.

Less than 18 months after he submitted his thesis and began work on his book, Russia attempted to invade all of Ukraine and was subsequently ejected as a Council of Europe member.

She noted that 2024 marks the 75th anniversary of the Council of Europe “and we have just marked 75 years of the universal Declaration of Human Rights at a time when the declarations of human rights as common standards of achievement of all peoples and all nations seem particularly hollow.”

She said now the potential of international law “to curtail the worst excesses of arbitrary force or to re-enforce even the core principle of humanity as a foundational principle of international humanitarian law and international human rights seems elusive.”

Andrew’s book – focused as it is on the Council of Europe and of the European Convention on Human Rights system and grey zones where human rights abuses happen often without detection, monitoring or a response – is well-timed.

She said the book is “informed by Andrew’s extensive professional and political experience at the heart of the Council of Europe and his earlier professional experience in post-conflict Kosovo (where he) experienced first-hand the complexities of transition to a just peace and democracy.”

“This professional experience, this practice experience, this experience at the heart of a politics of transition to peace and democracy shapes the analysis and the breath of this text,” she said.

“He presents an in-depth case study drawing on interviews with key stakeholders seeking to understand what we can learn from the Kosovo experience where Andrew spent many years.”

She said he presents potential lessons that can inform engagement with human rights gray zones “to ensure that they do not become for those within them black holes of human rights protection, holes of oblivion.”

While the book is an academic publication and won’t hit the Eason’s best-sellers list anytime soon, if you were to abbreviate Professor Mullally’s tribute you could say this book will ultimately save lives.

You can listen to Professor Mullally’s full speech on Changing Ireland’s YouTube channel here. Or watch our 25-minute recording of Andrew Forde’s launch speech on Changing Ireland’s YouTube channel where he summarises much of the work – for free – here.

For more on the book and its launch, see https://www.changingireland.ie/forde-calls-on-council-of-europe-to-respond-to-grey-zones.