Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is a barrister and one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers. Over the past 25 years she has acted in a wide range of landmark international human rights cases, from representing bereaved families of terrorist attacks; to advising governments on their obligations to child soldiers; to bringing groundbreaking test cases in the UK on the rights of survivors of gender-based violence; to overturning the death penalty for a rapper in Iran. Her work is wide-ranging, spanning children’s rights, violence against women, redress for survivors of child sexual abuse, open justice, the discriminatory impact of welfare cuts, reproductive rights, the right to protest, and State accountability for wrongful deaths.
Caoilfhionn has expertise on arbitrary detention. Her work for wrongfully imprisoned people has seen her take on governments around the world, and she has secured the freedom of over 85 wrongly imprisoned journalists, bloggers, cartoonists, businesspeople and activists. She is the world’s leading expert on accountability for deaths of journalists and 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. Her recent and current 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. She has given evidence on human rights issues before Parliaments in Australia, the USA, UK, Ireland, Germany, the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Alongside her practice as a barrister, and her work as a Commission Member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, Caoilfhionn sits on a number of boards, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Adjunct Full Professor at University College Dublin. She was formerly Ireland’s Special Rapporteur on Child Protection and she sat part-time as a Coroner in England and Wales. In 2023 Caoilfhionn was awarded the President of Ireland’s Distinguished Service Award for her work, and in 2025 she was awarded Irish Tatler’s International Woman of the Year Award.