Speaker details

Biography

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is a human rights lawyer, practising from Doughty Street Chambers, London. Over the past 20 years she has acted in many landmark human rights cases in the UK and internationally, before the European Court of Human Rights, international courts and UN bodies. Caoilfhionn has acted for, and secured the freedom of, many arbitrarily detained journalists, cartoonists, peaceful protestors and human rights defenders around the world, including in Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. She has also acted in a wide range of leading human rights cases, including on children's rights, reproductive rights, prisoners' rights, violence against women and girls, austerity policies and discrimination against marginalised groups, the rights of victims and survivors of terrorism, and inquests concerning failures by State bodies. Caoilfhionn has particular expertise in accountability for crimes against journalists. Her current cases in this field include leading the international legal teams for media owner Jimmy Lai, imprisoned in Hong Kong; for over 150 BBC News Persian journalists, targeted extraterritorially by Iran; for the bereaved family of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, assassinated in Malta in 2017; and leading (jointly with colleague Amal Clooney) the international legal team for Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist in the Philippines. Caoilfhionn has given expert evidence on accountability for crimes against journalists and gender-based violence against women journalists to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, UNESCO and Parliamentary inquiries in the UK, Australia and the Council of Europe. In 2023 Caoilfhionn was appointed Special Rapporteur on Child Protection by the Irish Government. She also sits part-time as a Coroner in England and Wales, is an Adjunct Full Professor at University College Dublin and is a Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equalities Commission. She was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2017 for her “outstanding commitment to enabling the Human Rights Act’s protections” for devising Act for the Act, a mass advertising campaign to tell positive human rights stories.