Caoimhe Butterly is an Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist 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.

[1] She was named by Time magazine as one of their Europeans of the Year in 2003[2] and in 2016 won the Irish Council for Civil Liberties Human Rights Film award for her coverage of the refugee crisis.

[9] In April 2002, she spent 16 days with other volunteers inside the besieged Muqaata compound in Ramallah, in solidarity with the Palestinians and to protest the Israeli military presence in the area.

She was initially a signatory to the Pitstop Ploughshares action that disabled a US warplane at Shannon in February 2003, but decided ultimately not to participate out of a desire to travel to Iraq in solidarity with civilians there.

[citation needed] At a 2003 Belfast summit between US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Butterly was arrested and dragged away by her hair for smearing red jam on the riot shields of two policemen.

A feeling of anger against the British Prime Minister was mounting in Lebanon, in relation to his stance during the war, his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire and his aligning of his policies with those of America President George W. Bush in support of the Israeli military operation.

She held a banner saying "Boycott Israeli apartheid" in front of live TV cameras, until security guards holding her by arms and legs carried her out.

[5] In 2005, she gave written eyewitness testimony in the inquest into the killing of UNRWA relief works project manager Iain Hook by an Israeli military sniper.

She is based in Dublin, though continues to work with trauma-informed psycho-social support programmes[15][16] and Search and Rescue response with refugees in Greece, Calais, Italy, Lebanon and the Central Mediterranean.