Caoimhe Butterly

Caoimhe Butterly is an Irish human rights campaigner, psychotherapist, educator and filmmaker who has spent over twenty years working in humanitarian and social justice contexts in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and with refugee communities in Europe.

She is a peace activist who has worked with people with AIDS in Zimbabwe, the homeless in New York, and with Zapatistas in Mexico as well as more recently in the Middle East and Haiti. In 2002, during an Israeli Defence Forces attack in Jenin, she was shot by an Israeli soldier. She spent 16 days inside the compound where Yasser Arafat was besieged in Ramallah. She was named by Time magazine as one of their Europeans of the Year in 2003 and in 2016 won the Irish Council for Civil Liberties Human Rights Film award for her coverage of the refugee crisis. Butterly is a pacifist and a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organisation that seeks non-violent alternatives to armed intifada by mobilising international civil society.