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Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is one of the worldтАЩs leading human rights lawyers and an experienced and sought after keynote speaker.
Over the past 25 years she has acted in many landmark cases on human rights issues, from representing bereaved families of the Hillsborough Disaster and the 7/7 London Bombings; to bringing groundbreaking cases which changed the law on the rights of children in custody in England and Wales; to overturning the death penalty for an Iranian womenтАЩs rights rapper, Toomaj Salehi.
She has expertise in journalistsтАЩ safety, media freedom, the right to protest, childrenтАЩs rights, womenтАЩs rights, and State accountability.
Caoilfhionn GallagherтАЩs work for wrongfully imprisoned people has seen her take on governments around the world, and she has secured the freedom of over 85 imprisoned journalists, bloggers, cartoonists, businesspeople and activists held in countries including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia and Equatorial Guinea.
She is an expert on accountability for crimes against journalists and has given testimony on these issues to Parliaments in the UK, Canada, US, Australia, to the Council of Europe, and she has given expert evidence before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on risks to women journalists.
Her cases on media freedom include leading the international legal teams for the bereaved family of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the assassinated Maltese journalist; for Jimmy Lai, the British publisher imprisoned in Hong Kong; for hundreds of BBC News Persian and Iran International journalists targeted extra-territorially by Iran; and for Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist from the Philippines.
Alongside her legal practice, Caoilfhionn Gallagher is also a Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, an Adjunct Full Professor at University College Dublin and a Board Member of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
She was previously a Coroner, IrelandтАЩs Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, and a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford.
She was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2017 for her тАЬoutstanding commitment to enabling the Human Rights ActтАЩs protectionsтАЭ for devising тАШAct for the Act,тАЩ a mass advertising campaign to tell positive human rights stories.
In 2023 she was awarded the President of IrelandтАЩs Distinguished Service Award for her work, and in 2025 she was awarded Irish TatlerтАЩs International Woman of the Year Award.
