Catherine Orourke

Background

About Catherine Orourke

Catherine O'Rourke is Professor of Global Law at Durham Law School and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant 'Centring Care in International Law'(2025-2030). She researches, teaches and engages in policy work in the fields of gender, conflict and international law. She works with the Irish and UK governments, the United Nations and several non-governmental organisations. As a scholar, she has a noted record of publications and research grants. Catherine is the former Director (2020-21) and Gender Research Coordinator (2010-20) of the Transitional Justice Institute and Senior Lecturer in Human Rights and International Law at Ulster University School of Law. She coordinated the Gender Theme of the £4.4 million pound DFID-funded Political Settlements Research Programme. Her academic awards include the Kevin Boyle Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2020-21 from the Irish Association of Law Teachers for her monograph 'Women's Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law'(Cambridge, 2020), an Irish Fulbright Scholar Award (2016), an Ulster University Distinguished Researcher Award (2019), and the 2010 Basil Chubb Prize, for the best PhD in politics from an Irish university, which was published as 'Gender Politics in Transitional Justice'(Routledge, 2013). Catherine is regularly commissioned by intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations to conduct expert research on gender and conflict, such as commissioned research on gender and reparations by UN Women and the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights, subsequently published in Harvard Human Rights Journal ‘Transforming Reparations for Conflict-related Sexual Violence: Principles and Practice’. More recently, she was commissioned as an expert to support the work of the International Criminal Court Trust Fund for Victims in designing a reparations implementation plan in response to the Court's reparation decision in the Lubanga case. Other commissioned work includes the UN Women Guidebook on CEDAW and the Women, Peace and Security Resolutions (2015, with Aisling Swaine).