Kevin Boyle, Professor of Law and former Head of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, died at Christmas. I knew Kevin from the mid 1960s when he was first appointed a lecturer in Law at Queens University in 1966. We worked closely together in the Peoples Democracy and on the Executive of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in the late 1960s and early 1970s and Kevin was prepared to take an active part in campaigning for the human rights that he was teaching about at a time when it was neither popular nor profitable for a young Law lecturer at Queens to do so.
He went on to set up the Human Rights Centre at National University of Ireland Galway and to work on the case taken by the Irish Government against the UK about the ill-treatment of people detained for internment without trial in Northern Ireland and on the case taken by Jeffrey Dudgeon, which led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland.
He then went to Essex at the start of the 1980s and developed the pioneering inter-disciplinary Human Rights Centre there, which married theory and practice by working for years on the defence of political prisoners in Turkey. He then worked for a time as senior advisor to Mary Robinson when she was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. It is only on looking back on his career that it becomes clear how much he achieved and how important a figure he was in the development of human rights law and practice.
The untimely death of Kevin Boyle is a great loss to the human rights community in these islands and further afield. He was a major pioneer in the field of human rights law and an academic who was always prepared to put his academic learning into practice in helping the oppressed and disadvantaged, whether in Northern Ireland during the Civil Rights movement or in defence of political dissidents in Turkey through the Human Rights Centre in Essex.
His legacy will be to have helped to strengthen the remedies available to those whose human rights have been infringed and to have taught a whole generation of lawyers how to use those remedies. His former students will also attest to his kindness and generosity as a teacher. My sincere sympathy goes to his family on his sad death at a time when he had so much still to contribute.
Michael Farrell is the senior solicitor with Free Legal Advice Centres and a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission.
Please click here to see an obituary to Kevin Boyle in the Guardian newspaper.