Conor Gearty obituary | Human rights

As a number one authority on counter-terror laws, Conor Gearty was incensed on the method anti-terror legal guidelines are so typically enacted to stifle debate and intimidate protest.The Labour authorities’s banning of Palestine Motion, he argued, was “preposterous”. He informed a podcast for Prospect journal that the then dwelling secretary, Yvette Cooper, had fallen again on the “ordinary declare they make in a good nook”, that “‘you don’t have any concept what I do know’ … They calculated the ban would produce not a lot of a response.”He has died immediately aged 67, shortly after recording his feedback, and having spent many years researching and writing about civil liberties and terror laws. The ban on Palestine Motion, he identified, was the primary time UK terrorism legal guidelines had been prolonged to take care of what seems to be a non-violent, direct motion motion.The outlawing of two different bizarrely named micro-organisations on the identical time, the Maniacs Homicide Cult and Russian Imperial Motion, was, he advised, political camouflage for the choice. It will have a chilling impact on all protests about Gaza.Gearty’s stance was constant together with his lifetime’s work. His final ebook, Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of International Anti-Terrorism Regulation (2024), which traces the historical past of the time period by colonial insurgencies, noticed that classification of an incident as terrorism relies upon extra on the identification of the perpetrator than the character of the occasion.As professor of human rights legislation on the London Faculty of Economics, Gearty was famend for his incisive wit and talent to keep up friendships even whereas disagreeing together with his opponents. As a talented orator and debater, he deployed appeal and curiosity to persuade. His college students cherished being concurrently challenged and made to chuckle.Shami Chakrabarti, the previous director of Liberty, described his loss of life as “an enormous loss for the human rights neighborhood”. The Labour peer Helena Kennedy, stated: “He was a fantastic instructor and made legislation so accessible. He had a robust ethical tackle points.”Born in Dublin and raised in Abbeylara, close to Granard, County Longford, Conor was the second of six youngsters born to Margot (nee Kiernan) and Enda Gearty, a solicitor.Conor was pleased with the household connections to the republican motion that drove the British out of most of Eire: his father was associated to Joe McGuinness, the primary Sinn Féin MP, who was elected in 1917; his mom was a niece of Kitty Kiernan, the fiancee of Michael Collins – one of many revolutionary founding figures of the Irish Free State.Having attended native colleges, Conor boarded on the Catholic Castleknock faculty in Dublin. He studied legislation at College Faculty Dublin, the place he twice gained the Irish Instances scholar debating competitors.After graduating in 1978, he certified as a solicitor however most well-liked academia – taking a grasp’s in legislation at Wolfson Faculty, Cambridge. Switching to Emmanuel Faculty, he grew to become a educating fellow and accomplished a PhD in environmental legislation in 1986. It was a topic, he later admitted, “on which I used to be by no means to put in writing one other phrase”. That yr he married Diane Wales, initially from Los Angeles, whom he had met at Cambridge. She grew to become a BBC producer.In 1990, Gearty moved to King’s Faculty London changing into successively senior lecturer, reader after which professor of human rights legislation. His succinct, partaking and persuasive type helped to launch a writing and publishing profession. He started as a columnist for the Irish Instances and contributed ceaselessly to authorized journals, the London Assessment of Books, Prospect, the Guardian, BBC radio and the Pill.Because the writer of just about 20 books on civil liberties, social rights and counterterrorism legal guidelines, he grew to become an more and more distinguished commentator. His first ebook, co-authored with Keith Ewing, was Freedom Beneath Thatcher: Civil Liberties in Trendy Britain (1990).His second, Terror (1991), reached a wider viewers, arguing that “the concept of world terrorism is a contrivance designed to legitimise state violence towards political opponents”.Initially sceptical in regards to the want for a human rights act – fearing it might be undermined by conservative judges – he authorised of the way in which the laws operated after 1998 and steadily developed right into a passionate advocate. The act supplied, he acknowledged, a authorized means to problem what may very well be repressive anti-terror legal guidelines.At a job interview for director of the LSE’s Human Rights Centre, he was requested: “Given your well-known objection to the entire concept of human rights, Professor Gearty, why have you ever utilized for this submit?” He nonetheless talked his method into the place in 2002.Gearty helped to coach judges within the utility of the Human Rights Act and was for a time a particular adviser to the Commons dwelling affairs choose committee. He grew to become a barrister late in life, showing within the Home of Lords with Cherie Sales space KC. A founder member of Matrix Chambers in 2000, he was concerned in a number of human rights instances.Diane died of most cancers in 2011. In 2015, Gearty married Aoife Nolan, a legislation professor at Nottingham College. Alongside educational work, he usually up to date a private web site and hosted a podcast, Gearty Grillings, by which he interviewed fellow lecturers.He was appointed an honorary QC in 2020. A fellow of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy, he obtained honorary levels from College Faculty Dublin and Sacred Coronary heart College in Connecticut, in addition to Brunel and Roehampton universities.Gearty was a neighborhood faculty governor; he loved tennis, supporting Fulham soccer membership and opera. Certainly one of his final articles recounted a summer season journey to listen to Wagner’s whole Ring Cycle on the Bayreuth competition, which he described as being the secular equal of the devoted attending “outdated Latin mass” in Nineteen Sixties rural Eire.Amongst quite a few tributes, the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, praised him as a “superb buddy, a positive scholar and a principled activist”.He’s survived by Aoife, his 4 youngsters from his two marriages, Eliza, Owen, Éile and Fiadh, and his mom. Conor Anthony Gearty, educational and barrister, born 4 November 1957; died 11 September 2025