Dr Emily Kakoullis (LLB (Kent), LLM (Maastricht), PhD (Bristol)) is a Lecturer in Human Rights Law and the Final Year Teaching Director at Cardiff School of Law and Politics. Emily specialises in International Disability Human Rights Law focusing on the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Prior to taking up this role she was a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter working on the GW4 Project The ‘Delegalized Space’ & ‘DIY’ Family Justice, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol where she was Principal Investigator (PI) on the interdisciplinary Project Investigating Disabled People’s and their Organization's Involvement in Decision Making at local authority level, in view of Article 4(3) CRPD in the UK (Bristol) context.

Emily completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Bristol, A Shift from Welfare to Rights: A Case Study of the Ratification Process for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Cyprus, which was interdisciplinary and empirical and focused on the interaction of the CRPD with the Cypriot domestic cultural context (Kakoullis, 2015). During her doctoral research she also worked as a Research Assistant on projects on the CRPD together with Professor Kelley Johnson, Professor Rachel Murray and Professor Judy Laing at the Human Rights Implementation Centre at the University of Bristol. Prior to her return to academia she worked as a Legal Researcher at the Ministry of Justice in the UK, and for a disability non-governmental organisation in Cyprus engaged in advocacy work with people with disabilities. During her LLM she also worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Trans-national Legal Research (METRO) at the University of Maastricht.

Dr Kakoullis and Professor Johnson are currently co-editing a book on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.