As a leading authority on counter-terror legislation, Conor Gearty was incensed at the way anti-terror laws are so often enacted to stifle debate and intimidate protest.
The Labour government’s banning of Palestine Action, he argued, was “preposterous”. He told a podcast for Prospect magazine that the then home secretary, Yvette Cooper, had fallen back on the “usual claim they make in a tight corner”, that “‘you have no idea what I know’ … They calculated the ban would produce not much of a reaction.”
He has died suddenly aged 67, shortly after recording his comments, and having spent decades researching and writing about civil liberties and terror regulations. The ban on Palestine Action, he pointed out, was the first time UK terrorism laws had been extended to deal with what appears to be a non-violent, direct action movement.
The outlawing of two other bizarrely named micro-organisations at the same time, the Maniacs Murder Cult and Russian Imperial Movement, was, he suggested, political camouflage for the decision. It would have a chilling effect on all protests about Gaza.
Gearty’s stance was consistent with his lifetime’s work. His last book, Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law (2024), which traces the history of the term through colonial insurgencies, observed that classification of an incident as terrorism depends more on the identity of the perpetrator than the nature of the event.
As professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics, Gearty was renowned for his incisive wit and ability to maintain friendships even while disagreeing with his opponents. As a skilled orator and debater, he deployed charm and curiosity to convince. His students cherished being simultaneously challenged and made to laugh.
Shami Chakrabarti, the former director of Liberty, described his death as “a huge loss for the human rights community”. The Labour peer Helena Kennedy, said: “He was a great teacher and made law so accessible. He had a strong moral take on issues.”
Born in Dublin and raised in Abbeylara, near Granard, County Longford, Conor was the second of six children born to Margot (nee Kiernan) and Enda Gearty, a solicitor.
Conor was proud of the family connections to the republican movement that drove the British out of most of Ireland: his father was related to Joe McGuinness, the first Sinn Féin MP, who was elected in 1917; his mother was a niece of Kitty Kiernan, the fiancee of Michael Collins – one of the revolutionary founding figures of the Irish Free State.
Having attended local schools, Conor boarded at the Catholic Castleknock college in Dublin. He studied law at University College Dublin, where he twice won the Irish Times student debating competition.
After graduating in 1978, he qualified as a solicitor but preferred academia – taking a master’s in law at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Switching to Emmanuel College, he became a teaching fellow and completed a PhD in environmental law in 1986. It was a subject, he later admitted, “on which I was never to write another word”. That year he married Diane Wales, originally from Los Angeles, whom he had met at Cambridge. She became a BBC producer.
In 1990, Gearty moved to King’s College London becoming successively senior lecturer, reader and then professor of human rights law. His succinct, engaging and persuasive style helped to launch a writing and publishing career. He began as a columnist for the Irish Times and contributed frequently to legal journals, the London Review of Books, Prospect, the Guardian, BBC radio and the Tablet.
As the author of almost 20 books on civil liberties, social rights and counterterrorism laws, he became an increasingly prominent commentator. His first book, co-authored with Keith Ewing, was Freedom Under Thatcher: Civil Liberties in Modern Britain (1990).
His second, Terror (1991), reached a wider audience, arguing that “the idea of global terrorism is a contrivance designed to legitimise state violence against political opponents”.
Initially sceptical about the need for a human rights act – fearing it would be undermined by conservative judges – he approved of the way the legislation operated after 1998 and gradually developed into a passionate advocate. The act provided, he acknowledged, a legal means to challenge what could be repressive anti-terror laws.
At a job interview for director of the LSE’s Human Rights Centre, he was asked: “Given your well-known objection to the whole idea of human rights, Professor Gearty, why have you applied for this post?” He nonetheless talked his way into the position in 2002.
Gearty helped to train judges in the application of the Human Rights Act and was for a time a special adviser to the Commons home affairs select committee. He became a barrister late in life, appearing in the House of Lords with Cherie Booth KC. A founder member of Matrix Chambers in 2000, he was involved in several human rights cases.
Diane died of cancer in 2011. In 2015, Gearty married Aoife Nolan, a law professor at Nottingham University. Alongside academic work, he regularly updated a personal website and hosted a podcast, Gearty Grillings, in which he interviewed fellow academics.
He was appointed an honorary QC in 2020. A fellow of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy, he received honorary degrees from University College Dublin and Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, as well as Brunel and Roehampton universities.
Gearty was a local school governor; he enjoyed tennis, supporting Fulham football club and opera. One of his last articles recounted a summer trip to hear Wagner’s entire Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth festival, which he described as being the secular equivalent of the faithful attending “old Latin mass” in 1960s rural Ireland.
Among numerous tributes, the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, praised him as a “very good friend, a fine scholar and a principled activist”.
He is survived by Aoife, his four children from his two marriages, Eliza, Owen, Éile and Fiadh, and his mother.
• Conor Anthony Gearty, academic and barrister, born 4 November 1957; died 11 September 2025
