Ireland
Ms Austin’s varied national and international experiences have informed her work for the last 30 years with the Council of Europe. Enriched by years of work as a solicitor in Dublin, she joined the European Commission on Human rights in 1994 and the European Court of Human Rights in 1998. Deputy Jurisconsult since 2015, she was appointed Jurisconsult of the Court in 2020, a position she holds to date. This work was combined with some inspiring secondments elsewhere.
As Deputy Ombudsperson for Bosnia and Herzegovina, she saw the Convention’s relevance in a post-conflict context. Leading the Office of the Investigating Judges of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia, she was excited by the daily application of Convention standards 10,000 km from Strasbourg. As an advisor to the COE Committee of Ministers, she grasped the need to support States in applying the Convention. As Legal Advisor to the International Advisory Panel on Ukraine, she witnessed the operation in real time of the Convention investigation obligations.
These converging experiences convinced Ms Austin that it was crucial to ensure effective access for everyone to Convention and Council of Europe standards, whether a victim, NGO, prosecutor, judge or Government official. As Jurisconsult, she worked to develop and launch (2022) the ECHR Knowledge Sharing platform, which has revolutionised access to those standards, ensuring that our precious Convention heritage impacts daily within the COE and, indeed, far beyond.
The project “75 women in 75 years of Council of Europe history” is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to the Council of Europe with the Council of Europe and the Permanent Representations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
