Monica McWilliams

Monica Mary McWilliams (born 28 April 1954) is a Northern Irish academic and former politician.

McWilliams was born in Ballymoney, County Antrim,^[1] grew up in Kilrea, County Londonderry and was educated at Loreto College, Coleraine. She is a graduate of Queen's University Belfast and the University of Michigan, and became Professor of Women's Studies and Social Policy at the University of Ulster.^[2]

McWilliams, a Catholic residing in south Belfast, co-founded (with Pearl Sagar, a Protestant social worker from East Belfast) the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC), a political party with a vaguely feminist platform that declined to take any position on the principal unionist/nationalist dispute. The party secured only 1.03% of the popular vote and failed to win any constituency seats in the 1996 Northern Ireland Forum elections, but was granted two seats under the 'top-up' mechanism designed to ensure the inclusion of minor parties. McWilliams took one of these seats and was thus able to attend the multi-party negotiations that led to the intergovernmental Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which her party supported (but did not, as frequently reported, 'sign').

She was elected as one of two NIWC Members of the Legislative Assembly in Northern Ireland (the other being Jane Morrice) on 25 June 1998, having secured 3,912 votes in South Belfast (9.6%). During the negotiations following the Agreement, she was the Chairperson of the Human Rights Sub-Committee until 2003. In 2001 she ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in South Belfast, securing 2,968 votes (7.8%). In the 2003 Assembly election her vote fell further, to 2,150 (6.9%), and she lost her seat to Sinn Féin. (In 2006 the NIWC ceased to exist due to declining electoral fortunes.)

McWilliams returned to her university post from 2003 until she was appointed by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland as full-time Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission in June 2005, for a three-year term. She was reappointed, for four years, in September 2008, but announced in August 2010 that she would resign her appointment in August 2011, a year before its expiry. Under her six-year leadership the Commission failed to win any Parliamentary support for the enactment of a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. In 2011 she returned to the University of Ulster as Professor of Women's Studies and an Associate Researcher with the Transitional Justice Institute which carries out research on gender, transition, human rights and conflict.^[3] She had also been associated with INCORE, a joint Ulster University and United Nations University research centre for the study of conflict.

McWilliams was one of five persons appointed in December 2011 to a Prisons Reform Oversight Group advising the Northern Ireland Department of Justice.^[4] In early 2012 she lobbied unsuccessfully for appointment as UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantee of non-recurrence, the post going instead to Pablo de Greiff.^[1][5]

McWilliams has co-authored two government-published research studies: Bringing It Out in the Open: Domestic Violence in Northern Ireland (1993, with Joan McKiernan) and Taking Domestic Violence Seriously: Issues for the Civil and Criminal Justice System (1996, with Lynda Spence) and has published several articles on the impact of political conflict as well as on aspects of poverty and women's rights. She was one of nine politicians involved in the Northern Ireland peace process who were jointly awarded the John F. Kennedy Library Profile in Courage Award in 1998.^[6] She was a joint recipient of the Frank Cousins Peace Award in 1999 (commemorating a British trade union official).^[7] She has also received honorary doctorates from Lesley College (Massachusetts) and Mount Mary College (Milwaukee).

References

External links

• Ulster University