Magnitsky Awards
Presenter’s Bio

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC has acted in many of the leading human rights cases in the UK in recent years, including acting for bereaved families and survivors of the 7/7 London bombings and the Hillsborough disaster, and acting in a series of cases which have established that the UK Government’s welfare changes are discriminatory. Caoilfhionn undertakes many ‘test cases’ which secure results for her clients but also achieve wider change in the law.  For example, her recent cases include acting in a number of successful challenges to the Department of Work and Pensions’ benefit changes, R (Hurley and others) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2016] PTSR 636 (benefit cap unlawfully discriminates against the severely disabled), R (A and Rutherford) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2016] HLR 8 (social sector size criteria, ‘bedroom tax,’ unlawfully discriminate against women) and R (MA) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2013] PTSR 1521 (Regulations required to correct discriminatory impact of the bedroom tax on severely disabled children).

Caoilfhionn has particular expertise in freedom of expression and open justice. She regularly advises and acts for newspapers and broadcasters in the UK concerning journalistic access to the courts and public interest reporting. She has acted, for example, for media organisations in the inquests into the deaths of Alexander Litvinenko and Gareth Williams (the GCHQ employee found dead in a holdall), ensuring that these hearings were open to public scrutiny and could be freely reported. She worked with the Media Lawyers’ Association and the Chief Coroner in the development of new guidelines on open justice in the coroners’ courts. She also regularly acts for journalists worldwide who are imprisoned, prosecuted, sued or subjected to travel bans due to their journalism; her current and recent case load includes work for journalists, bloggers, cartoonists, peaceful protestors and human rights defenders in Egypt, Turkey and Equatorial Guinea. She leads the international legal team for the family of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the award-winning journalist assassinated in Malta in 2017, and she is leading counsel to 152 BBC Persian journalists persecuted by Iran due to their work. She is a member of the UK Advisory Board to Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and regularly works with Index on Censorship and other NGOs specialising in freedom of expression.

Women’s rights is another area of particular interest for Caoilfhionn. Much of her work in relation to austerity and welfare cuts concerns the disproportionate impact of those cuts upon women, particularly BAME women and victims and survivors of domestic violence. She has also acted in a series of cases concerning the almost total ban on abortion in Northern Ireland, including R (A and B) v Secretary of State for Health [2017] UKSC 41 and Re Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission [2018] UKSC 27.

Caoilfhionn also has expertise in children’s rights and she has acted in many of the leading cases in this field, including HH v Italy [2013] 1 AC 338 (right of children to be heard in extradition proceedings concerning their parents) and R (HC) v SSHD [2014] 1 WLR 1234 (acted for Hughes Chang in this test case on treatment of 17-year-olds in police custody as adults rather than children; it has resulted in a change to the law, affecting 70,000 17-year-olds in custody every year). Internationally, she acts in many cases concerning children’s rights, particularly in Strasbourg and before the UN Special Procedures, and she has provided consultancy services to the UN on child soldiers and Boko Haram.

Caoilfhionn is a graduate of UCD, the King’s Inns and the University of Cambridge (Gonville and Caius). In 2017 she received UCD’s alumni award for outstanding achievements by a UCD law graduate, and in the same year she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for her contribution to the protection of human rights. In 2016 she was named by the Irish Times as one of the 100 most influential Irishwomen living outside Ireland.

She is one of the three joint founders of the ‘Act for the Act’ campaign (with Martha Spurrier and Fiona Bawdon), a crowdfunded mass advertising campaign to tell positive stories about the Human Rights Act 1998.