Aoife Daly is a Lecturer at University College Cork, specialising in human rights, particularly children’s civil and political rights. She has a background in both law and psychology and much of her research centres around how children make decisions, and how the law reacts to those decisions. Her ISRF-funded project considers children’s ‘competence’ and how the law can take a more evidence-based and rights-based approach with a proper appreciation of context – competence will be different in criminal contexts where children may act under pressure; as opposed to medical matters where they have support to carefully consider different factors. In 2020 she published the article ‘Assessing Children’s Capacity’ with the International Journal of Children’s Rights.
In 2018 she published a book entitled Children, Autonomy and the Courts: Beyond the Right to be Heard with Brill/Nijhoff. The work compares the distinct prioritisation of personal autonomy in areas such as medical law to the enormous paternalism in other decisions about children (such as where children will live on divorce). It is argued that courts should support and prioritise children’s own wishes to the extent possible – there should be a high threshold to override them.
Aoife is an Honorary Research Fellow at the European Children’s Rights Unit at the University of Liverpool, a unit in which participatory research is conducted with children on issues of children’s rights in Europe and beyond. In 2018 she led a team advising the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission on good practice examples of making rights in UN treaties a reality in the UK. She is currently working on projects concerning children’s right to sex education, and how public attitudes to children affect how they are treated (with colleagues at the University of Stockholm). She has two children of her own who frequently assert their autonomy rights, particularly at bedtime.
