Professor Yvonne McDermott Rees

Professor of Law, Queen’s University Belfast

Yvonne McDermott Rees is Professor of Law at Queen’s University, Belfast. Yvonne is an expert in international criminal law, international human rights law, the law of evidence, and law and technology, particularly artificial intelligence. She is author/editor of seven books, including Digital Witness (Oxford University Press, 2026, co-edited with Alexa Koenig, Sam Dubberley, and Daragh Murray); Proving International Crimes (Oxford University Press, 2024); Judicial Independence Under Threat (co-edited with Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos), and Fairness in International Criminal Trials (Oxford University Press, 2016), and author of over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles, reports, and book chapters. Yvonne is Principal Investigator of the TRUE project, which explores the impact of deepfakes on trust in user-generated evidence, from 2022-2027. She is also Principal Investigator on a UKRI-funded project which explores the impact of AI chatbots on violence against women and girls. From 2018-2021, she led OSR4Rights, a project that examined how open-source evidence has transformed human rights fact-finding, and which was awarded the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize for Outstanding International Impact in 2024. Yvonne is Managing Editor of the Journal of International Criminal Justice and Master of the Bench of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.