Alyson Kilpatrick studied law at Queens University Belfast, the Inns of Court School of Law London and the College of Europe Bruges. She practised at the Bar of England and Wales from 1992 and the Bar of Northern Ireland from 2008. Alyson has extensive experience of litigation in the higher courts in a range of public law and human rights cases.
Throughout her career, Alyson has published extensively including legal textbooks, law reports’ series and encyclopaedias of law and practice. For example, she was a contributing author to The Human Rights Act 1998: A Practitioner’s Guide, the author of Discrimination Law and the author of Housing Law in Northern Ireland. Alyson was a Commissioner on the Independent Commission on the Future of Housing in Northern Ireland, which reported to government in 2008.
Between 2009 and September 2017, Alyson was the Independent Human Rights Advisor to the Northern Ireland Policing Board. During that time, she published annual human rights reports and thematic review reports on, for example: domestic violence; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights; race hate crime; stop and search; child sexual exploitation and; policing with children and young people.
In 2016, she was appointed special legal advisor to the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation and continued until September 2021.
Until November 2017, she was Chair of the Board of the Simon Community Northern Ireland and, until 2020, Vice Chair of the Board of the Northern Ireland Co-Ownership Housing Association. She is a founding member of the Board of the Foyle Family Justice Centre (One Safe Place).
Since 2023, Alyson has been a National Expert for the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales on homelessness and Chair of the Northern Ireland Strategic Steering Group for the Foundation's Homewards NI project.
She has participated as an independent expert in a number of human rights oversight and scrutiny panels such as in the review of journalistic surveillance conducted by Mr Angus McCullough KC. In 2009, Alyson was a member of the Irish Government’s delegation to Timor Leste on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 where she spoke on policing oversight and provided recommendations for a revised code of conduct for UN military personnel overseas. In 2018, Alyson conducted, on behalf of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, an independent human rights inspection of An Garda Síochána. She was appointed to carry out an independent review of the ECHR compliance of a number of NI ‘legacy’ investigations, known as Operation Kenova. Her final report was published on 31 August 2021.
On 1 September 2021, Alyson was appointed Chief Commissioner to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. Since then, she has been elected to the Board of the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions and as Vice-Chair of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, (the latter representing 119 NHRIs across the world).