Sue Willman

Background

Sue Willman KC (Hon) is a senior consultant and former DPG partner with over 30 years’ experience of innovative public interest litigation and collaboration with non-profit organisations and campaigners. In 2025, Sue was recognised as an honorary KC for her work to protect the basic rights of asylum-seekers and refugees. She has led DPG’s international human rights work and is a ‘senior statesperson’ in Chambers Directory. As a senior lecturer at King’s College, she has established the Human Rights and Environment Legal Clinic.

Expertise

Sue is committed to using public and human rights law as a means of challenging social and environmental injustice. Sue’s current interests lie in tackling the climate and nature emergency. She works closely with the Environmental Law Foundation and is a member of the Law Society Climate Change Working Group. She is active in the rights of nature movement which advocates for a move away from ‘human-based’ environmental law and policy, towards eco-centric legal systems. She works closely with About — London Waterkeeper to share ideas for protecting our rivers using the Rights of Nature Toolkit | King’s Legal Clinic | King’s College London. She is also working with communities to protect rivers around the world, from Serbia to the delta of the River Ganges in India, collaborating with Doughty Street Chambers on ‘soft law’ remedies. She co-established the Environmental Rights Recognition Project with Harry Balfour-Lynn, now counsel at Brick Court Chambers to advocate for a new legal right to a healthy environment.

Sue established Pierce Glynn’s public law and human rights law team, which has an impressive reputation, reflected in the Legal 500 and Chambers Directory rankings. She is one of the few top ranked lawyers for civil liberties and human rights, and administrative and public law in both the Legal 500 and Chambers directories where she has been described as “an extremely committed solicitor: uncompromising and fearless”, and “tactically astute.” Her migrant support work has been recognised with awards by LALY, Modern Law awards and as The Times Lawyer of the Week.

She is interested in using Magnitsky sanctions and universal jurisdiction to tackle human rights violations. In the wake of the Arab Spring, she supported the work of human rights defenders from the Middle East and the Gulf Repressive gulf states.  She led a team with Ahmed Ali (now led by Dan Carey) assisting Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in a legal intervention challenging arms exports licences to Israel for use in Gaza.

Sue collaborated with partner Emily Soothill and Ahmed Ali in a series of challenges relating to the Home Office policy of housing asylum seekers in military barracks, first the successful Napier Barracks judicial review and more recently regarding Wethersfield.  She has worked closely with NGOs including Medical Justice, Detention Action, AVID and BID to tackle arbitrary detention including in the European Court of Human Rights.

Sue is a founding Director of the Colombia Caravana campaign group which was established in 2008 to challenge threats and murders of human rights lawyers in Colombia and has worked on a number of amicus curia (interventions) linked to human rights and the environment, especially involving indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. She is former Chair of the Law Society Human Rights Committee.

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