Day of the Imprisoned Writer Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC

In Partnership with Irish PEN / PEN na hÉireann

Irish PEN/ PEN na hÉireann is proud to present one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers, Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC. She will discuss recent developments in censorship – from prosecutions of Hong Kong booksellers and authors, to restrictions on books with LGBTQ+ themes in US public libraries, to Israeli police raids of an East Jerusalem bookshop and the confiscation of Palestinian books – and how we can fight back. 

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers. Over the past 25 years she has acted in many landmark cases internationally, in the UK and Europe, including representing bereaved families of the Hillsborough Disaster and the 7/7 London Bombings, and in test cases which have changed laws on children’s rights, for survivors of abuse, and on access to abortion in Northern Ireland. Internationally, Caoilfhionn’s 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, musicians, businesspeople and activists. She is the world’s leading expert on accountability for deaths of journalists and regularly acts for bereaved families of journalists killed for their work. Caoilfhionn was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2017 for her “outstanding contribution to the protection of human rights,” for devising a mass advertising campaign to highlight positive human rights stories. In 2023 she was awarded the President of Ireland’s Distinguished Service Award and in 2025 she was Irish Tatler’s International Woman of the Year.

Supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.

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