Director of the Centre for Disability Law and Policy
Established Professor School of Law
University of Galway
E: eilionoir.flynn@universityofgalway.ie
Eilionóir is an Established Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Centre for Disability Law and Policy (CDLP) at University of Galway. Her work on disability rights is widely published and her current research interests include legal capacity, access to justice, and the intersectionality of disability, gender and ageing. Her most recent research projects include the Re(al) Productive Justice: Gender and Disability Perspectives project, funded by Wellcome, as well as work with Inclusion Ireland and the National Disability Authority.
Eilionóir is passionate about educating a new generation of disability activists and scholars, and was the Scientific Co-Ordinator of a Marie Curie Initial Training Network known as DARE (Disability Advocacy Research in Europe) which funded 15 early stage researchers working on various disability rights issues across seven European countries. Prior to this project, Eilionóir held a European Research Council Starting Grant for the VOICES project, which documented the narratives of people with lived experience of legal capacity denial.
Eilionóir regularly collaborates with civil society organisations and disabled peoples organisations at national and international levels. In Ireland, she co-ordinated the Civil Society Legal Capacity Coalition to influence the drafting of the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act and internationally she has supported the Secretariat of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, particularly the working group which developed General Comment 1.
She is a graduate of University College Cork (BCL, PhD), and received a scholarship from the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences for her PhD research on advocacy for persons with disabilities in Ireland and Australia. She published her first book with Cambridge University Press in 2011, entitled "From Rhetoric to Action: Implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities". This work was based on her postdoctoral research on comparative National Disability Strategies, conducted at the CDLP. She has also served as one of the editors of the European Yearbook of Disability Law and co-edited the Routledge Handbook on Disability Law and Human Rights. Her next co-authored monograph, "Re(al) Productive Justice: Gender and Disability" will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Lecturer
Centre for Disability Law and Policy
E: janos.fiala-butora@universityofgalway.ie
János Fiala-Butora is a Lecturer in International Disability Law at the Centre for Disability Law and Policy. He received his law degree from Comenius University (Slovakia), and also holds a degree in International Relations from the University of Economics (Slovakia), an LLM in International Human Rights Law (2004) from Central European University (CEU, Budapest), and an SJD from Harvard Law School (2016), where his doctoral research focused on international human rights standards relating to legal capacity of persons with disabilities.
János is a human rights attorney with extensive experience in representing persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and persons deprived of their liberty before the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Committee on the Right of Persons with Disabilities and other international bodies, including some high profile judgments in the area of freedom from torture, legal capacity and access to education. He also actively consults with governments on their human rights laws and policies, and has advised a number of Council of Europe and UN bodies.
From 2005 to 2008, he was the first legal officer of the Mental Disability Advocacy Center (MDAC), developing the organization’s litigation and advocacy work in Central and Eastern Europe. He later served as the Legal Director of the Disability Rights Center (DRC), Executive Director of Minority Rights Group Europe (MRGE), Director of the Central Europe Program of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD), and Executive Director of Validity (former MDAC).
His research focuses on international human rights mechanisms, rights of persons with disabilities, and ethnic and minorities.
Carla Sabariego holds a degree in Psychology from the Universidade de São Paulo, followed by a two-year specialisation in Clinical Psychology at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, both in Brazil. She completed both Master's degree in Public Health and Epidemiology and her PhD in Public Health and Epidemiology, with a focus on cost-effectiveness evaluations of rehabilitation programmes, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany. Her habilitation, completed in 2016, focused on the implementation of the WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) as a conceptual framework in clinical rehabilitation and public health. She completed the habilitation at the Medical Faculty of LMU Munich, where she worked for 15 years as a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Public Health and Health Services Research.
From 2011 to 2018 she was a consultant with the WHO in the area of functioning and disability measurement: she mainly contributed to the development, pilot testing and implementation of the WHO and World Bank “Model Disability Survey” – a dedicated functioning and disability survey – in several countries worldwide. She also participated in the development and implementation of the WHO Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) Indicators Manual, and was involved in projects about disability assessment in the scope of disability determination for disability benefits.
At the University of Lucerne, she was appointed in August 2024 as Full Professor for Rehabilitation and Healthy Ageing. She currently heads as vide dean the Division of Rehabilitation and Functioning Sciences of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine and is director of the Center for Rehabilitation in Global Health Systems, a WHO Collaborating Center since 2018. Due to her bridge professorship, she also leads the working group on Ageing, Functioning Epidemiology and Implementation at the Swiss Paraplegic Research, in Nottwil.
Her research interests lie primarily in disability policy, especially regarding access to long-term care for persons with complex and disabling health conditions, disability assessment in the scope of disability determination and disability measurement and reporting at population level.
Paula Campos Pinto, PhD in Sociology, is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Social and Political Sciences of the University of Lisbon, where she is also deputy director of CIEG, the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies, and the coordinator of the Disability and Human Rights Observatory (ODDH). ODDH is a platform that brings together academics, disability organisations and decision-makers to support disability research and advance disability rights in Portugal and Portuguese-speaking countries (https://oddh.iscsp.ulisboa.pt/en/goals/).
Paula has a long-time experience in monitoring disability rights. From 2004 to 2015, she was an associate researcher with Disability Rights Promotion International, a global initiative funded by SIDA, that developed a system to monitor disability rights through participatory methodologies. In this role, she supported research on disability rights, carried out by disability organisations in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Canada. Since 2015, she has been a member of the core research team of the European Disability Expertise (EDE, former Academic Network of European Disability Experts). EDE is a project financed by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Union, which aims to collect, analyse and provide scientific data relating to national policies and legislation and the situation of persons with disabilities in Member States. She was also the elected Chair of the National Mechanism for Monitoring the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Portugal, from 2016-2021.
Paula Campos Pinto has coordinated numerous national and international research projects related to disability, human rights, gender, and the impact of policy on people’s lives, and is the author of many national and international publications.
Her research interests lie primarily in disability and human rights, encompassing disability rights monitoring, gender and disability, independent living, legal capacity and self-determination, disability and poverty, disability in developing countries, qualitative methods and participatory research.
Teresa Janela Pinto is an academic at ISCSP-ULisboa, where she coordinates the MA in Social Policy. She holds a PhD in Social Policy and teaches undergraduate and advanced education programs, specializing in comparative social policy and advanced research methods. She has also taught in international programs and collaborates on postgraduate training in disability, human rights, and policy evaluation.
She is Vice-Coordinator of the Disability and Human Rights Observatory (ODDH) and an Integrated Researcher at CIEG, both hosted by ISCSP-ULisboa. She also serves on the Ethics and Scientific Committee of the International Foundation of Applied Disability Research (FIRAH). With a multidisciplinary background in social policy, family intervention, and psychology, Dr. Pinto focuses on bridging social policy and practice through a human rights lens.
She has contributed to national and international projects on disability, gender, and public policy. As Co-Principal Investigator of EQUAL, she assessed Portugal’s legal capacity law and served as a National Expert on Gender-Responsive Public Procurement in a study for the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).
Her research interests include disability rights, inclusive education, family policy, and participatory research. She has authored several publications on disability, human rights and social policy.
PREPARED is co-funded by the European Union’s Marie Skiodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), University of Galway, and Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas Universidade de Lisboa (ISCSP); Grant Agreement Number 101179497 (Jan 2025 to Dec 2029). Call identifier: HORIZON-MSCA-2023-COFUND-01. PREPARED is also supported by Schweizer Paraplegiker-Forschung AG (SPF) and Wellspring Foundation.