Flying high
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC has acted in many of the leading human-rights cases in Britain. The Irish-born barrister represented survivors of the Hillsborough disaster and the 7/7 London bombings. She is the current Special Rapporteur for Children. Mary Hallissey caught up with her
Growing up in a purposeful, book-filled home in Portmarnock, Co Dublin, with two strong-minded parents, Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC and her sibling were told they could do anything.
Instilled early with the belief that anything was possible, Caoilfhionn has gone on to achieve some remarkable things as a global human-rights lawyer.
Her mother, formerly a midwife, became a dedicated teacher in Darndale and her father was a civil servant and passionate numismatist (coin collector).
“I used to go into school with my mother quite a bit, and it was really inspiring to see her being so committed to doing something that made a difference. It was instilled in me from a very early age to think about ways to use your time and your talents to benefit others.”
Caoilfhionn’s family roots run deep on Dublin’s northside. Her late uncle Seán, to whom she was very close, was a solicitor and her godfather: “My father and his brother Seán lost their parents young and were very close, with a nine-year age gap. He and his family were a constant presence in our house.”
Guiding presence
Seán was a guiding presence who tragically passed away early in the pandemic. Inge Clissmann SC is an aunt by marriage and another formative influence.
Books and language were central to her childhood. She devoured everything from Just William by Richmal Crompton, to When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr, to PG Wodehouse and Roald Dahl. Reading helped her understand the power of words.
“I was a real bookworm. We didn’t have a TV until I was 17. For a long time, I wanted to be a writer,” she says.
“Myself and my sibling did a careful campaign to lobby to get TV into the house, claiming that we would use it to watch German and French news, which was nonsense. Once in, we watched anything and everything!
“I love a good drama series and a good podcast. I had stopped reading fiction because work was intruding, and you read for a living as a lawyer. But I’ve returned to doing a lot more reading now. I’ve returned to one of my old loves, writing – fiction, short stories and creative writing, as well as opinion and campaigning journalism. I love the power of language and what words can do to move people and change things.”
Drama queen
This love of words translated into excelling at schools debating and youth theatre, with stints in Betty Ann Norton’s drama school.
“I was academic, and that opens lots of doors for you. Of course, it’s very embarrassing when you’re much smaller and you know the answers to questions, and you pretend you don’t!”
Caoilfhionn chose to study law at University College Dublin. “It was always going to be something with words – writing, acting, or law,” she says.
But it was a desire to make a difference that ultimately steered her toward human rights.
Her university experience was formative – both intellectually and personally. During her studies, a serious car accident left her badly injured and confined to a wheelchair for almost a year.
She campaigned for better conditions for students with disabilities, working with fellow students to improve accessibility in Belfield.
Despite physical challenges and advice to take a year off, she remained determined, living on campus to continue her studies.
Finding her tribe
At UCD, she found lifelong friendships and a sense of belonging.
“I found my tribe. It was a really inspiring time to be in UCD; a lot of the people I was there with have gone on to do amazing things. I was surrounded by people who I thought were brilliant and interesting.”
Caoilfhionn is now an adjunct professor: “UCD did so much for me, and it’s great to be able to give something back.”
She was clear that she wanted to be an advocate, and did the King’s Inns while also teaching law at both UCD and TCD, developing an interest in both human-rights and media law and a clarifying sense of the importance of freedom of expression.
She then studied at Cambridge for a master’s, focusing on human rights and civil-liberties law. That was a pivotal year, coinciding with 9/11. Subsequent counter-terrorism steps raised human-rights concerns.
Over the pond
She discovered that her studies had a visceral, real-world impact on questions of the balance of rights, especially for individuals targeted by the state: “I was very lucky to be offered a job at Liberty, Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties,” she explains.
“I did a lot of work on both policy and in the European Court of Human Rights. I acted on some important cases, such as [2008].”
She then transferred to the Bar of England and Wales in 2005, just as the 7/7 terror attacks occurred in London. She acted for the bereaved families in related inquests and proceedings and saw what could go wrong in human-rights violations when the state tackles terrorism.
In 2005, she joined Doughty Street Chambers, which she had admired from afar, with luminaries such as Helena Kennedy KC: “I had to pinch myself: suddenly Helena’s my colleague, and she’s now actually a very dear friend.”
As a self-employed barrister and the mother of three teens, it’s very important to Caoilfhionn that the profession remains open to all those with caring duties.
“It really is very difficult to take time off when you’re self-employed – your practice stops, your income stops. And then you’ve got to return, and all those things that are so difficult when you return to work after having a baby, that crisis of confidence of thinking the world has moved on.
“When I returned to work, I was still breastfeeding. And it’s made harder by the fact that you don’t have maternity pay – you don’t have those benefits. But I did find the chambers system a good support. Doughty Street had a progressive policy, with a form of allowance that was offset, and that eased the financial impact.”
Pregnancy loss
“Unfortunately, before having my eldest, and then after, I’ve had recurrent miscarriages. I’ve had a lot of pregnancy loss, and I found that camaraderie of women at the Bar who’d gone through those things really helpful.
“The very first time I had a miscarriage was in court, and I was doing this really very difficult case as a very junior lawyer. I went into the robing room, and I confided in one of my colleagues in chambers, a woman called Isabella Forshall KC, who died very prematurely.
“She was amazing. Got me to hospital, sorted me out, she was incredible and kept it to herself. And I really valued that – she was a remarkable person. It was tough. And looking back now, I’m not quite sure how I did so many things.
“When I think about the 7/7 inquests, I was expecting my second. My daughter was two and having night terrors, and my husband had an academic job outside of London and was commuting. I now look back and it feels so surreal. I don’t really understand how I did it, how I kept going. You’re just focusing on your clients because you are there for what is the most important time of their lives.”
The experience of combining motherhood and high-profile legal work has left Caoilfhionn empathetic to those with caring duties.
What she found most difficult as a junior lawyer and mother was last-minute requests for late work sittings.
“It’s very disruptive for childcare reasons, but I was very self-conscious about being the one to say: ‘No, I can’t do that.’ Assumptions are made about your availability, and I would be desperately stepping outside and trying to sort out emergency childcare.
“But what I now feel, as a senior woman in law, is that I never let those conversations happen now without putting up my hand and saying: ‘Is that going to work for people with caring responsibilities?’, because I know how difficult it was to do that as a junior person.”
Weight of responsibility
After Caoilfhionn took silk in 2017, she received a letter at chambers from an older female lawyer who would write to each woman who became a KC. The letter explained that Caoilfhionn was only the 393rd woman ever to do so.
“I was shocked at the number being so low, especially since there were over 1,600 men actively practising at the Bar! And that does mean you feel a weight of representation, as one of the few women there, if you stumble or make a mistake.
“But, in some ways, when people underestimate you, it can be a superpower, can’t it? Because, if they underestimate you, they don’t necessarily see you coming.”
Although she has always maintained an international dimension to her work, the vast majority of her cases are now global in nature. This involves a lot of international travel.
“People who don’t do it think it’s glamorous, but it’s absolutely not at all. But a lot of the time, you can achieve things in person that you can’t achieve over a Zoom call. And, of course, many of my clients are also at risk and under surveillance.”
Her very presence can have helpful effects, but some of her travel is high risk and requires careful planning and lots of security.
On one case in Kuwait, monitoring a trial of pro-democracy supporters, Caoilfhionn was detained for a long period with no phone – an experience she describes as utterly terrifying, but which has given her an even greater understanding of her clients’ predicaments.
“It’s nothing compared to what your clients are going through, but it does give you a very stark reminder of just what’s at stake in these cases.”
Fighting for journalists
A significant portion of her practice is dedicated to defending journalists and their families.
“I’m working on a book about accountability for deaths of journalists, which is a topic very close to my heart,’ she says.
“I’ve spotted systematic patterns, where the world fails journalists before they’re killed – and then the world fails journalists after they’re killed. When a journalist is deliberately targeted and killed, it is an attempt to silence the story,” Caoilfhionn adds.
“Increasingly, what we’re seeing is journalists being targeted with a much wider range of legal weapons, such as intellectual-property laws and regulatory laws.
“I see many examples of journalists being wrongly accused of things that they haven’t done, which are designed to undermine the messenger and then to undermine the message.”
A client, Maria Ressa (the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Filipina journalist) has faced years of legal persecution under the Duterte regime and spurious allegations of tax evasion.
José Rubén Zamora in Guatemala was accused of being a fraudster, while Hong Kong newspaper proprietor Jimmy Lai was accused of fraud for an alleged lease violation.
“Make no mistake about it, what Maria has been charged with, essentially, is ‘conspiracy to commit journalism’. She’s got a criminal conviction and a sentence of six years for her public-interest journalism,” Caoilfhionn says.
“Maria Ressa has, for years, been targeted with ‘lawfare’ – the misuse of law to try to silence her. She was, at one point, facing over a century behind bars. I was with her in Oslo when she collected the Nobel Prize and it was such a privilege.
"Her Nobel lecture started by paying tribute to many of the other journalists who’ve either been killed or who are behind bars for their work.”
Another important strand of Caoilfhionn’s work is on arbitrary detentions abroad. She sees families who fought for the release of their loved ones continue campaigning for others.
“I’m working on setting up a network in Ireland so that we can learn lessons from the success stories – and from the cases that went wrong,” she adds.
When Caoilfhionn acts for families with loved ones wrongly detained in a place that is not rule-of-law compliant, her clients feel as if they’re fighting a battle on two fronts – since they’re also having to fight a battle at home with their own government to get their case taken seriously.
“That is shameful – it shouldn’t happen. And it’s so important that governments take this issue more seriously,” she says.
Stepping back
She has recently engineered a delicate rebalancing act. The feeling of being pulled in many different directions prompted her to figure out what was most important in her life.
“An obvious next professional step for someone at the Bar in London, in my position, is to become a High Court judge in England and Wales, but it’s not something that appeals to me.
“I’ve been a silk for eight years and it was time to reassess. I really had a stock-take moment, on quite a few things. I felt I was being stretched too thin. There were many brilliant silks who could take over the cases I was handling,” she reflects.
So she decided to focus more on her international cases, believing that her expertise was needed in a more niche area where the stakes were high and the need for advocacy urgent.
“I feel like the world is on fire, and there’s a lot to do. One of the shocking things that we’re seeing now is not democracy dying in darkness, but democracy dying in plain sight.”
She sees the regimes that target journalists, bloggers, and human-rights defenders getting more and more creative: “We, as lawyers, need to get more creative too, and that’s part of the reason that I’ve mothballed my practice, because I want to spend more time on international issues that I think are very important.
“I get asked all the time to do international cases that are totally heartbreaking, and I have to say ‘no’. There’s a very small pool of people with the right expertise. I feel there are a few big issues where there’s a real opportunity to change things systematically.”
Taking the rap
Currently Caoilfhionn is acting for a rapper in Iran, Toomaj Salehi, who was sentenced to death for his music.
“He is a remarkable man. Rap is illegal in Iran and his art, his words, his music shines a light on women’s-rights issues and abuses of women there. Because of that, he was targeted by the authorities.
“I was privileged to lead the international legal team for him, and we overturned the death penalty in his case, and several months later, we got him out of prison. Our next battle is to keep him safe.
“My clients are brave, remarkable people who’ve chosen to use their voice, despite the risks to themselves. And they continue speaking, with such courage. If I’ve got skills that can help them in some way, I’ve got to use them.”
As well as global human-rights work, Caoilfhionn has a role as an IHREC commissioner. She also serves as the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection in Ireland, with urgent issues to address, ranging from child poverty to the treatment of children in the criminal-justice system.
“As a mother of three teens, I can tell you that having children’s-rights expertise is particularly frustrating when you need to tell your kids to do their homework or stop their screen time,” she laughs.
With parents and other family still living in Dublin, Caoilfhionn visits frequently.
“We will move back at some point, we just need to make the timing work for everybody, which is complicated with children in school and exams. We’re working it out. Dublin is ‘home-home’, and I miss the sea! I also want to spend more time devoted to my Irish work as well.”
Plane passion
She is now learning to fly a small plane, a passion ignited in her teenage years and shared with her late Uncle Seán, who, growing up in Whitehall, was obsessed with aviation.
“When I was a kid, I quite often flew with him and loved it, and really caught the bug. And I started learning when I was a teenager. And then, of course, I had my accident, and it all stopped. I always meant to go back to it. I suddenly got to my late 40s and I hadn’t done it, so it was a real kind of carpe diem moment for me.”
Flying, she explains, is a rare opportunity to completely disconnect from the emotional weight of her work and the constant worry about clients going through horrific ordeals.
“There’s a real burden on you to do the best possible job for them. You feel quite guilty when you take any time off. And the thoughts are always there. And I find, if I swim or if I run, they’re still there.
“I can tell you that, being in a tiny tin-can flying in the sky, you can’t think of anything else, so you switch off, because you’ve got to! I’ve decided to focus on the things that bring me joy and that are important.”
Caoilfhionn believes that a lot of her important human-rights work could be done from Dublin. She is currently working to create a pipeline that allows young Irish lawyers to get involved in international human-rights work from Baile Átha Cliath.
“There is such talent here, and Ireland has got incredible international lawyers. It’s important to me that people who want to do that work don’t feel that they must go to London, or the Hague, or Washington DC.”
Mary Hallissey is a journalist at the Law Society Gazette.