Nuala Kelly

Nuala Kelly is a 1997 HRAP graduate from Ireland. She is a program coordinator at Pavee Point Traveller & Roma Centre (Pavee Point), an Irish NGO adopting a community development approach to promote Traveller and Roma rights and social inclusion. Pavee Point advocates for promoting equality, preventing discrimination and protecting human rights of vulnerable ethnic minority groups – Irish Travellers and Roma communities in Ireland. The organization lobbies for human rights-based approaches to ethnic data collection across administrative systems to inform policy and practice from an evidence-based approach.

Participation in HRAP enlarged Nuala’s knowledge of the international human rights system. She says: “I learned more about the international human rights infrastructure, the role of some international and regional treaty monitoring bodies, the role of human rights NGOs and in particular, the importance and application of economic, social and cultural rights standards to promote social change and engage the voices of disadvantaged groups in society.” 

HRAP’s skills’ workshop in fundraising had a practical impact on Nuala’s organization – the Irish Bishops’ Commission for Emigrants & Prisoners Overseas. She recalls: “I developed a funding application during the HRAP course which I was able to adapt on return and successfully sought funding for a new paralegal position in my organization. This was a new approach at the time and it enabled us to fund advocacy work to seek improvements in the operation of a Council of Europe Convention for the Transfer of Sentenced Persons. It also helped to build links with NGOs and human rights organizations that contributed to the work towards building the peace process in Ireland after ceasefires urging that peace would only be enabled if human rights were protected and respected.”

Nuala highlights an important feature of the HRAP, namely the benefit of stepping back from a long-term working experience to reflect and identify new ways of complementing and strengthening human rights work. She notes: “HRAP offered space to step back and reflect on my work over the previous 13 years and identify ways to develop more human rights-based approaches to supporting prisoners far from home and, in some instances, network and lobby for changes in conditions or procedures that fell short of international human rights norms.”

For Nuala, one of the greatest benefits of the HRAP is the exposure to geographically diverse perspectives on human rights work. “Meeting fellow students from diverse ethnic backgrounds and a range of continents allowed us to share understandings of the many issues in our work, which although very different in scale and content, still resonated with my own work in ‘so-called’ developed western democracies where the rule of law was not at all perfect and where human rights abuses in the context of the Irish Troubles were still too widespread,” says Nuala.

 - Article compiled by Chiora Taktakishvili, Fulbright Exchange Visitor, July 2019