Sue Willman

Practice Areas

Sue is committed to using public and human rights law as a means of challenging social and environmental injustice. Formerly a senior partner, she has moved to work as a consultant, leading a team of lawyers at DPG on strategic cutting-edge cases.

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.” On 10 June 2021 she was named The Times Lawyer of the Week having represented asylum seekers held at Napier Barracks in a successful judicial review. This was followed by a planning judicial review of the Home Office decision to use Wethersfield ex-MoD base as an asylum accommodation centre in 2023.

Collaboration with NGOs, such as the Oiljustice Project she established with War on Want, and creative ways of working are at the heart of this work. Sue has particular experience of using UK law to tackle torture. She is interested in using universal jurisdiction to seek prosecutions in the UK of those who commit acts of torture abroad. She continues to support the work of human rights defenders from the middle east and the Gulf states, for example using Magnitsky sanctions. She was instructed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Rights Watch UK in a legal intervention in the Court of Appeal challenging arms exports to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen.

After decades of work promoting better welfare provision for migrants, including EU nationals and Roma, Sue’s work with migrants is now mainly with detainees and ex-detainees. She has secured the release of countless foreign national prisoners unlawfully detained, whilst always seeking a means of strategically challenging restrictive Home Office approaches. She works closely with NGOs including Medical Justice, Detention Action, AVID and BID to tackle arbitrary detention at a legal and policy level. This had led to interventions up to the Supreme Court and petitions to the European Court of Human Rights.

Sue is a founding Director of the Colombia Caravana campaign group which established in 2008 to challenging threats and murders of human rights lawyers and environmental defenders 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. She works closely with the Environmental Law Foundation, is a trustee of London Mining Network and is a supporter of the rights of nature movement which advocates for a move away from ‘human-based’ environmental law and policy, towards legal systems which recognise the rights of nature.

Where there is no legal aid to fund cases, Sue can advise on crowd-funding options, and flexible private funding arrangements. In the Lewis case she secured costs protection for her client and guidance to confirm there is Aarhus costs protection in cases where the environment is only part of the claim.

Sue has successfully used public sector equality duty arguments to resolve a number of discrimination cases involving disabled clients. She has also taken on multinational companies which still fail to provide equal access to transport to disabled people, working with paralympic athletes such as Anne Wafula-Strike.

Career

Sue Willman 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. Sue is particularly well known for her work to protect the basic rights of migrants, whether refugees or EU nationals. In recent years, she has led DPG’s international litigation on human rights and the environment. She also works part-time at King’s College where she has established a Human Rights and Environment Legal Clinic, the first in the UK, working with communities in the global south affected by climate change.