Email: a.mawhinney@bangor.ac.uk

Phone: +44 (0)1248 388204

Location: Room 408, Main Arts Building

Professor Mawhinney’s main research interests are in the areas of freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and the wider issue of human rights protection within a devolved constitutional context. She is also interested in issues of digital exclusion, including the protection of freedom of expression and access to services.  

Professor Alison Mawhinney is a constitutional and human rights lawyer with a specialisation in the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.  She completed her undergraduate studies at Trinity College Dublin where she graduated with a BA (Hons) in Political Science. She earned a LLM in International Human Rights Law (Distinction) at the University of Essex and a PhD at Queen's University Belfast. From 2006-2010, she was a lecturer at the School of Law, Queen's University Belfast, where she served as Assistant Director of the Human Rights Centre. She joined Bangor University in 2011. From 2019 – 2021, she served as Head of the Law School.

Before joining academia, Professor Mawhinney worked for a variety of bodies in the field of human rights, including the European Court of Human Rights and the Directorate of Human Rights at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. She also worked for the Council of Europe in several of its Balkan field offices (Kosovo; Albania) where she was responsible for the development of human rights and rule of law activities including the development of the Kosovo Ombudsperson Institution, the Kosovo Law Centre, the Albanian Legal Compatibility Project, death penalty reform measures and human rights training for judges, prosecutors and lawyers.

Professor Mawhinney worked for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on several projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including as adjudicator on the voting rights of returning refugees following the Dayton Peace Agreement (Visegrad, Republika Srpska; Zenica, Bosnia). She also worked for the UN in North Korea where she was in charge of the assessment and monitoring of aid to hospitals, schools and orphanges in different regions of the country (Hamhung; Sinuju) during the famine of 1997.

At home she has worked in the area of asylum and refugee law for the Irish Refugee Council in Dublin and the Red Cross Refugee Orientation Programme in Belfast, in both instances focussing on cases of unaccompanied women and minors, and applications for family reunification. 

Professor Mawhinney’s main research interests are in the areas of freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and the wider issue of human rights protection within a devolved constitutional context.  She has acted as Principal Investigator on a number of AHRC funded projects including an AHRC inter-disciplinary research network, which examined the statutory duty to hold acts of collective worship in UK schools: Collective Worship & Religious Observance in Schools: An Evaluation of Law and Policy in the UK  http://collectiveschoolworship.com/index.html.  

Other research projects include an AHRC funded investigation into the effectiveness of opt-out provisions in protecting freedom of religion and belief standards in schools:  Opting out of religious education: the views of young people from minority belief backgrounds; and a SLS (Society of Legal Scholars) funded examination of the potential of the experience of Northern Ireland as a successful functioning jurisdiction to inform the future of legal organisation in Wales: 'Small legal jurisdictions in the UK: the legal and practical considerations.'

Professor Mawhinney has regularly presented her work before UN human rights bodies in Geneva, including to the UN Human Rights Committee regarding the protection of religious/belief liberty in the Irish school system. This resulted in a ground-breaking recommendation to Ireland to reform its education system.

In 2016, together with Carys Aaron, she presented a shadow report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, arguing that budget reductions by the UK Government to the Welsh-language public service broadcaster (S4C) failed to respect the language and cultural rights of Welsh children.

Professor Mawhinney has served as an adviser to the Council of Europe’s Group on Human Rights Monitoring in the Field and, in 2017, acted as an adviser to the European Commissioner on Human Rights’ Expert Group on Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/women-s-sexual-and-reproductive-rights-in-europe.

Between 2015 - 2022, Professor Mawhinney was a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Public Policy Advisory Group (PPAG). She has served as an external examiner at the University of Manchester and the Cardiff School of Law and Politics. She regularly acts as a peer reviewer for books and journals including Legal Studies, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Education Law Journal, Journal of Law and Religion, Journal of Human Rights, Ashgates Publishers, Routledge, Manchester University Press, Palgrave, and as a grant reviewer for the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Dr Mawhinney teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and is Director of the LLM Programme in International Criminal Law and International Human Rights Law.

Current Undergraduate and Postgraduate Modules

SXL 3110: International Law & Contemporary Issues (module leader)

SXL 3113: Dissertation 

SXL 4042: International Human Rights Law (module leader)

SXL 4052: International Climate Change Law (module leader) 

SXL 4300: Dissertation 

Previous Undergraduate and Postgraduate Modules

SXL 4043: European Human Rights Law (module leader)

SXL 4020: The Law & Devolution in Wales & Europe 

SXL 4009: Legal Research Methods (module leader)

SXL 4134: Law, Religion and Belief (module leader)

SXL 4219: Public Law in Wales

SXL 4218: Administrative Law and Devolution

SXL 1110: Public Law (module leader)

SXL 2134/3134: Law and Religion (module leader)

SXL 2144/3144:  International Human Rights Law (module leader)

Principal Investigator, AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Research Programme Award: 'Opting out of religious education: the views of young people from minority belief backgrounds', £80,250.   A multi-disciplinary research team comprised of lawyers, educationalists and social scientists examined the efficacy of international human rights standards in the protection of religious liberty in schools from the perspective of minority belief students, parents and community representatives.

Principal Investigator, AHRC Research Network Grant (Connected Communities Programme) ‘Collective Worship in Schools: An Evaluation of Law and Policy in the UK’, £35,000.  Over a two year period, a multi-disciplinary team of ten academics drawn from Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and England examined the existing duty placed on state schools to hold daily acts of collective worship.

Principal Investigator, ESCR Impact Acceleration Award, £13,500. The award enabled a series of events to take place aimed at increasing the impact of the findings and recommendations arising from earlier research work on the rationale and role of the duty of collective worship in schools in the UK.

SLS (Society of Legal Scholars) Research Activities Fund Award: 'Small legal jurisdictions in the UK: the legal and practical considerations', £2,200.   The project aimed to identify the lessons to be learned with regard to the future of legal organisation in Wales from an examination of Northern Ireland as a successful legal jurisdiction within the UK. Empirical research was conducted through interviews with key legal and academic figures in Northern Ireland. 

Membership of Professional Organisations/Networks

Law and Religion Scholars Network

International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies

Society of Legal Scholars

Socio-Legal Studies Association

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Media appearances

"Sunday", Radio 4, Ed Stourton, 12 June 2016, UN Recommendations on Collective Worship in schools / Reform of RE curricula

BBC Wales, "The Jason Mohammed Show", March, 2016: Collective worship in Welsh schools

"Sunday", Radio 4, William Crawley, 6 December 2016, The place of collective worship in UK schools

"Sunday Sequence", BBC Northern Ireland, November 2011, Opt-outs and Religious Education.