Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC address on ‘Lawyers in the Firing Line: Attacking the Advocates'

The John and Pat Hume Foundation and INCORE are delighted that Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, the distinguished international human rights lawyer, will deliver an address on ‘Lawyers in the Firing Line: Attacking the Advocates' at the NI Human Rights Festival at 6.30pm on Monday 8 December 2025 in Room BC LG 304, in the University of Ulster Belfast campus, York Street, Belfast.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation chaired by Prof Rory O’Connell, Professor of Human Rights and Constitutional Law, Transitional Justice Institute & School of Law.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is a barrister and international human rights lawyer. Over the past 25 years she has acted in many leading human rights cases in the UK, Europe and internationally. Her British work has included acting for bereaved families, victims and survivors of the Hillsborough Disaster and the 7/7 London Bombings; bringing a series of test cases which have changed the law for children in police custody in England and Wales, resulting in additional protections for 70,000 17-year-old children each year; and successfully challenging discriminatory welfare cuts on behalf of disabled children and adults, carers and victims of domestic violence. Her international work is wide-ranging, ranging from landmark cases before the European Court of Human Rights on discrimination law and the right to protest, to advising governments on obligations to child soldiers in West Africa, to securing accountability for cross-border victims of child sexual abuse.

Caoilfhionn is a leading global expert in journalists’ safety, transnational repression and arbitrary detention. She has secured the freedom of over 80 imprisoned journalists, business people, lawyers, musicians, cartoonists and activists wrongly imprisoned worldwide (including in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, China, UAE, Russia and Equatorial Guinea), and she has overturned the death penalty for a number of her clients sentenced to death for peaceful protest, rapping and journalism. Her caseload includes leading the international legal teams for Jimmy Lai, the publisher and pro-democracy campaigner unjustly imprisoned in Hong Kong; the bereaved family of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the assassinated Maltese journalist; hundreds of BBC News Persian and Iran International journalists targeted extra-territorially by Iran; and Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist from the Philippines. She was appointed an expert witness on State obligations in relation to violence against women journalists before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Jineth Bedoya Lima v. Colombia.

Caoilfhionn has acted in landmark cases concerning the rights of the Irish community in Britain and in complex cases concerning cross-border issues between Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain. She led the legal team acting for the family of Margaret Keane, overturning a ruling preventing them from using an Irish-only inscription on her gravestone, and she is a Trustee of the charity Irish in Britain.

Alongside her practice, Caoilfhionn is Ireland’s Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, an oversight role on child protection policy and legislation. She is also a Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, a Board Member of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and an Adjunct Full Professor at University College Dublin. In 2017 she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for her “outstanding commitment to enabling the Human Rights Act’s protections” for devising and founding ‘Act for the Act,’ a mass advertising campaign to tell positive human rights stories. In 2024 she was awarded the President of Ireland’s Distinguished Service Award in recognition of her work, the highest honour for Irish people abroad; and in 2025 Irish Tatler named her their ‘International Woman of the Year’, stating that they are, “honoured to celebrate an Irish-born human rights lawyer whose career blends courtroom excellence with fearless public advocacy for the world’s most vulnerable”.