King's College London

The honorary appointment is an opportunity to recognise those in the legal profession who have made a significant, positive impact outside the courtroom on either the shape of the law in England or Wales or the legal profession.

Sue joined King’s in 2020 as Assistant Director and Supervising Solicitor of King’s Legal Clinic and launched the UK's first Human Rights and Environmental Law Clinics to work with students on legal initiatives to tackle the climate and nature emergency. She remains a senior consultant at public interest firm Deighton Pierce Glynn where she has been at the forefront of public law strategic litigation for three decades, advancing the rights of migrants.

She laid the foundations for legal practitioners in the field of asylum support, co-authoring the first comprehensive textbook on this issue in 2001, and chaired the Asylum Support Appeals project for more than a decade. More recently, she acted for Amnesty International and HRW in an intervention in the judicial review of the UK licensing of arms exports to Israel.

Work with students in King’s Legal Clinic most recently saw the launch of the 'Rights of Nature Toolkit: How to protect Rivers in England and Wales’ for protecting the environment from a Rights of Nature perspective. Sue’s work at the Clinic has also included working on a Ugandan deforestation case, supporting a landmark legal complaint which aims to protect endangered species in Serbia and developing a cross-cultural module in India, ‘Transnational Remedies to Environmental Harms’.

Sue collaborates with global south communities affected by the adverse impacts of mining, applying a Rights of Nature approach where possible. The HRE Clinic successfully filed a complaint under the Bern Convention, making Rights of Nature arguments with the NGO Earthrive.

Sue is currently supporting environmental justice initiatives in India, helping to develop legal clinics that will work to tackle the climate and nature emergency, in partnership with the National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata. Recent publications on the right to a healthy environment include ‘The Right to a Healthy Environment in the United Kingdom: Supporting the Proposal for a New Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights’, and ‘A slow dance: What next for the right to a healthy environment after the European Court of Human Rights Climate judgment?’.

Sue will be sworn-in at the official King’s Counsel Appointments Ceremony, presided over by the Lord Chancellor on behalf of HM The King, at Westminster Hall on 24th March 2025.