Gerard Quinn is the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities. One of his main priorities is to connect debates about disability rights to broader challenges facing humanity, which includes the scourge of war. He sees the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) as pressing a reset button on a lot of outlying fields, including international humanitarian law (IHL).

A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Inns of Court in Ireland (Barrister), Gerard was one of the drafters of the UN CRPD. He previously worked in the EU (DG EMPL) and sat on a Council of Europe treaty monitoring body on social rights, founded the Centre of Disability Law & Policy at the National University of Ireland and served on the Irish President’s Council of State. He has held visiting positions at the University of New South Wales (UNSW-Sydney), NALSAR (Hyderabad, India), Wuhan University (China), Haifa University (Israel), Harvard Law School and Deakin University (Melbourne). He currently holds part-time chairs at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute (University of Lund, Sweden) and at Leeds University (UK).