New ways to fight age-old global battles

Lifestyles – NUIG Law graduate Gearóid Ó Cuinn is passionate about human rights and is the driving force behind the unique GLAN Network. He tells JUDY MURPHY how it works locally, nationally and internationally to take on governments and multi-nationals when their economic and political actions are destroying people’s lives.

Sometimes you have to follow your gut. That’s what Waterford-born Gearóid Ó Cuinn did while the science graduate from UCD was on a scholarship to Notre Dame University in the USA in 2001.  The result of his gut decision is a unique organisation, working out of Galway, that works with communities and professionals all over the world to challenge global human rights abuses.

Gearóid was in America when New York’s Twin Towers were attacked, an event that led to the US-UK invasion of Iraq. That invasion awakened something in Gearóid, leading him away from science and towards law.

He began dropping into lectures in International Law given by Defence Rights lawyer Juan Mendez, who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Argentinian dictatorship in the 1970s and later became UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Soon after, Gearóid changed course.

He returned to Ireland to pursue a law degree at NUIG. Gearóid attended lectures by night and did “substitute teaching in Spiddal by day and pulled pints in Áras na nGael at night” to pay his way.

The NUIG Law Department had “a great set of characters who were great to back you up and give advice”, he says of his time there.

Gearóid went on to do a PhD in the University of Nottingham and then lectured in law at Lancaster University. But his heart was elsewhere and he “wanted to do something a little less passive”.

During his college holidays, Gearóid had volunteered in Palestine and the occupied Golan Heights, and what he experienced in those places stoked his desire for justice.

This quietly spoken man points out that nothing in the world is unconnected and while he was in Palestine in 2004, he saw “Irish cement being poured into the separation wall”. Gearóid is referring to the barrier built by the Israelis in the occupied Palestinian Territory.

The International Court of Justice deemed this structure illegal under international law at that time, but it still exists, with dreadful consequences for Palestinians.

“The Irish connection to what was going on in Palestine showed that our own back garden wasn’t being put in order,” says Gearóid about this country.

Soon after graduating from Galway he decided to take action and set about “pulling the expertise of colleagues together, using it to address cross-border issues”.

That’s what he’s been doing since, firstly with Ceartas, Irish Lawyers for Human rights in Galway, and then with GLAN, which has offices in London, Galway and Berlin and links with legal firms all over the world and with universities including Yale and Stanford in the USA.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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