Born: November 4th 1957
Died: September 11th 2025
For someone who wants to believe in law, it is “depressingly clear” that international court rulings that Israel is breaching international law in its war in Gaza have had “zero” effect, Conor Gearty, who unexpectedly died aged 67, wrote when introducing his last book.
Gearty, who was professor of law at the London School of Economics, a barrister and globally acclaimed human rights scholar and advocate, said Israel “no longer even bothers seriously to defend its mass killing along even spuriously lawful lines”.
Israel, he said, “just kills away”, while its supporters in the United States and Europe “mobilise the law against those determined to oppose the realisation in real time of the genocidal plan against which the ICJ has warned”.
The effect of international court rulings “has been zero, the platitudes about peace are as empty as ever, while the delivery of weaponry, material and logistical support remain as real as they always been, with tens of thousands dead, maimed, orphaned as a result”.
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Gearty had focused on the colonial roots of global-anti-terrorism in his last book, Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-terrorism Law, published in May 2024.
The future of human rights, he argued, depends on justice for Palestine and Palestinians.
Gearty, who grew up in Abbeylara, Co Longford, was from what he described as an “immensely legal” family. His grandfather Francis, a District Court clerk, was the first in the family to study law. He set up a law firm after qualifying as a solicitor. Gearty’s father Enda and uncle Padraic, followed by his brother Frank and nephew Lorcan, continued the family firm.
Gearty attended Castleknock College, Dublin, and went on to study law in University College Dublin. A superb and witty orator, he twice won The Irish Times debating competition, and also won the Observer Mace debating competition. His first win, in 1979, was with Donal O’Donnell, now Ireland’s Chief Justice. In 1980, he won with John O’Donnell, now a senior counsel and published poet.
In an interview earlier this year on The Human Mind podcast, Gearty said, while pursuing a law degree at UCD, he had at the same time qualified as a solicitor, a “punishing workload”.
He opted to be a solicitor after developing a “loathing” of barristers from seeing them arrive in the Irish midlands for cases. “They were always from Dublin, always men, always from what I thought of then as very posh schools, and they patronised the solicitors, of whom my father was one. So I developed an aversion to them which was ridiculous and irrational but I refused to become a barrister and I became a solicitor.”
[ Conor Gearty: The Irish Times Debate: ‘It was die or be killed’Opens in new window ]
After graduating, Gearty, keen to get away from 1980s Ireland, “an awful, poor, benighted place, dominated by the Catholic Church”, left for Wolfson College, Cambridge, to pursue a master’s degree. He later became a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and got a scholarship to do a PhD in environmental law, which he achieved in 1986.
At Cambridge, he met Diane Wales, who went on to become a BBC producer; they married soon after and had two children, Eliza and Owen.
In 1990, he moved to the school of law at King’s College, London, where he was appointed professor of human rights law in 1995.
The 1980s was a difficult period for some Irish in Britain but not Gearty. As a fellow at Emmanuel College, a wealthy and traditional college, he was an Irish person meeting the queen and chief justice because he was in an “elite” community, he told The Human Mind.
There were “two types” of Irish people in Britain, those mixing in elite communities and those in places like Kilburn who were often subject of discriminatory action, the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of the Birmingham Six being a case in point, he said.
From 2002 to 2009, Gearty was director of the centre for the study of human rights at the London School of Economics and was professor of human rights law at the LSE from 2002. From 2012 to 2016, he was director of the LSE’s Institute of Public Policy, during which time he engaged in multiple innovative educational projects, including leading on the drafting of a crowdsourced UK constitution.
He was a visiting professor at Boston University, the University of Richmond and the University of New South Wales. He was a recipient of honorary degrees from UCD, Brunel and Roehampton universities and Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.
Having overcome his early loathing of barristers, he became a practising barrister and was a founder member of Matrix Chambers in London where his colleagues included Cherie Booth, wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair. He was a frequent adviser to judges, practitioners and public authorities on the implications of the UK Human Rights Act.
In 2021, he was appointed an honorary queen’s counsel, now king’s counsel, in recognition of his services to law in England and Wales.
His cousin Mary Rose Gearty, now a judge of the Irish High Court, said he was great fun and exhilarating company, in addition to being an excellent teacher. Having attended some of his lectures at King’s College, she said: “There was something really memorable about the way he would get his point across; it was exciting; it made you more interested in the topic.”
Her description was echoed in many written condolences from former students who described inspirational, often hilarious, lectures by a teacher who was not just brilliant but kind.
Gearty was the author of several books on civil liberties, human rights and counter-terrorism. His books include British Torture, Then and Now: The Role of the Judges (2020); On Fantasy Island. Britain, Europe, and Human Rights (2016); Terror (1991) and Freedom under Thatcher: Civil Liberties in Modern Britain (1990), co-authored with Keith Ewing.
He also produced podcasts, essays and talks, including an imaginatively titled lecture, Was Michael Collins a Terrorist or Human Rights Worker?
Gearty was proud of his own link to Collins via his mother Margot, a niece of Collins’s fiancee Kitty Kiernan. His father Enda was related to the first Sinn Féin MP, Joe McGuinness.
Gearty returned to Ireland regularly to visit family and to address legal and human rights events.
Last February, while recovering from a shattered pelvis suffered in a bike accident in October 2024, Gearty told The Human Mind he had some health issues over the years and was trying to work less. “I’m not sure I’m a workaholic but I don’t relax, my personality is bound up with the work I do, the work spills into recreation and vice versa.”
President Michael D Higgins led many tributes delivered on both sides of the Irish Sea after Gearty’s sudden death at his home in Kentish Town, north London.
[ ‘Inspirational’ human rights lawyer Conor Gearty dies aged 67Opens in new window ]
Gearty, he said, was a leading figure in the advocacy of civil liberties and human rights and “a very good friend, a fine scholar and a principled activist” who would be “much missed”.
With human rights under mounting threat, Baroness Helena Kennedy KC spoke for many rights advocates in lamenting: “His wisdom was so needed in these dark times.”
Conor Gearty is survived by his wife Aoife Nolan, a professor of law at Nottingham University; his four children Eliza, Owen, Éile and Fiadh; his mother Margot, brother Frank, sisters Rhona, Catherine, Margaret and Sarah, and extended family. He was predeceased by his late wife Diane Wales, who died in 2011 from cancer, and his father Enda.
