Lt Col The Revd Nicholas Mercer

Lieutenant Colonel the Revd Nicholas Mercer was educated at St Andrews and Oxford University.  He was admitted as a solicitor in 1990 and subsequently commissioned into the Army Legal Service 1991.  He served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia Herzegovina (IFOR/SFOR/EUFOR), Cyprus and Germany and was an instructor at the International Institute of Humanitarian Law, San Remo 2001-2011.  He was Command Legal Adviser for the HQ 1^st (UK) Armoured Division during the Iraq War 2003.

In 2011, he was ordained as a priest and was named Liberty Human Rights Lawyer of the Year 2011-2012 for “courage and integrity in the face of dissembling and denial of human rights abuses by British forces in Iraq”.

He has been a Trustee of Redress since 2011 and is a member of Liberty’s Policy Council.  Since 2019, he has been the Rector of Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire.