It is likely that Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh herself was the first person to be surprised by the unexpected avalanche of admiration that triggered her final argument before the International Court of Justice, in which she accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. This Irish lawyer's life and beliefs had prepared her from the start to write such a personal and passionate speech.
When she was 12 years old – she told Irish Legal News magazine in 2022 when she was chosen “Lawyer of the Month” – she found a booklet about Majella O'Hare full of books on her mother's bookshelf. A British paratrooper shot the little girl in the back in 1976 as she walked to church in the Northern Irish town of Whitecross.
Blinne asked, crying, how he could have allowed such a crime to happen. “Do something about it,” replied her mother, who had moved to London with her two daughters and raised them. She became an assistant principal of a public school. “I think about this answer often. His words touched something inside me. “I still have that brochure after so many years – the lawyer is now in her 30s – and I have it framed in my office to remind me of what drove me here,” Blinne recalls.
She was registered as a barrister in 2005 and works at Matrix Chambers, a firm with offices in London, Geneva and Brussels. He joined the South African legal team that defended that African country's accusation against Israel of alleged genocide in its war offensive in Gaza before the United Nations International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Only the flexibility of the British education system allows people with a deep calling for public service and the judiciary to enter the world of law, even if it is untimely and unplanned. Ní Ghrálaigh studied French and Latin at Queens' College, Cambridge. It was only at the end of his studies that he realized that he was attracted to the world of law and he prepared to take the bridge course that would enable him to make the leap.
Before that, he worked for an American think tank for a few years with the intention of saving everything he needed for his studies. The traditional route led her to prepare to become a barrister, a type of British lawyer who focuses more on preparing a case or doing office work than on arguing legal matters in a court of law, although there are exceptions to this.
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But character is destiny, and Ní Ghrálaigh's combative and activist personality led her to accept the offer to act as legal observer for the Northern Ireland Commission of Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday is a historic milestone in the conflict on this island. On January 30, 1972, 14 unarmed civilians died at the hands of the British Army while taking part in a peaceful demonstration for civil rights in the city of Londonderry (Derry to Northern Irish Republicans).
“It was a great privilege to be part of this historic trial and to represent and get to know these families. I still maintain friendships with many of them,” he told Irish Legal News. “His unwavering dignity, resilience and perseverance in the pursuit of truth and justice over the years remains a source of inspiration,” said Ní Ghrálaigh. This case convinced him that his fate lay on the witness stand and arguing in court.
London was the setting for his childhood and youth, but family summers were always for Ireland. He speaks Irish fluently and knows the island's music and dance. Their mother Neasa, raised in Dublin but with roots in County Mayo on Ireland's west coast, instilled in her daughters a deep republican feeling.
Solidarity with Palestine
The Palestinian cause sparks solidarity in Ireland similar to that in South Africa. The lawyer took part in a UN-commissioned legal observation mission to Gaza in 2009, following Israel's military invasion known as Operation Cast Lead. “It is difficult to put into words the extent of the devastation and trauma I have experienced. “It was one of the professional experiences that had the most impact on me,” he remembers. When her mother died in 2011, the family asked relatives to donate the money from the flowers to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
She specializes in international humanitarian law and the defense of the right to protest and has taken part in relevant trials, such as the genocide charge brought by Croatia against Serbia at the same International Court of Justice where South Africa now brought the charge against Israel populated.
The case that made Ní Ghrálaigh a star, however, was that of the Colston Four. The lawyer defended in court Rhian Graham, the only woman in the quartet, who was accused of throwing into the port of Bristol in 2022 the statue of Edward Colston, a benefactor of this British city who made his fortune in the slave trade .
The four were acquitted in a paradigmatic case to show that under criminal norms there can sometimes be stronger moral and just reasons that carry their weight. The defendants, Ní Ghrálaigh convinced the judge, had acted under the defense of the “faith in the consent” of those affected by their attack on public property and were convinced that the citizens of Bristol would consent to the statue's demolition were. And also under the defense of “prevention of a crime” because the four concluded that there was something criminal in honoring with cast iron the person responsible for the slavery of more than 80,000 people and the deaths of 20,000 people . from them.
“Convention [para la prevención y el castigo del delito] Genocide is much more than the construction of legal precedents. “It is, above all, about the affirmation and support of elementary principles of morality,” said Ní Ghrálaigh in her closing argument before the International Court of Justice, to which she called for an immediate cessation of attacks by the Israeli army in Loop as an urgent precautionary measure.
It was this constant pursuit of moral justice, almost like the pursuit of destiny, that ultimately led to the Irish lawyer being tried before 17 judges and millions of citizens from around the world.
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