Investigating Deaths in Custody, Where's the Progress?

Our new vice squad

by Liz Davies

The Haldane Society is delighted to announce that Imran Khan, Kate Markus and Gareth Peirce have accepted our invitation to be Vice-Presidents of the Society, joining the existing Vice-Presidents: Kader Asmal, Louise Christian, Tess Gill, Helena Kennedy QC, Michael Seifert, David Turner-Samuels, and Professor Lord Wedderburn QC. Mike Mansfield QC remains our President and gives his time unstintingly to the Society. We’re proud to be associated with all of these eminent lawyers.

None of our new Vice-Presidents need much introduction to Socialist Lawyer readers.

Imran Khan is best known for his ferocious and tireless advocacy for the Stephen Lawrence family, from first advising them very shortly after Stephen’s murder, through the various attempts to use the law to find his killers guilty when the police refused to prosecute, to the McPherson Inquiry’s damning conclusion that the Metropolitan police are ‘institutionally racist’ – a vindication for the Lawrences. He’s known as an antiracist campaigner, as well as a radical lawyer who is constantly testing the boundaries of the law. He specialises in what he calls ‘impact cases’, which, in their early stages, rarely receive public funding and require him to work free of charge. Unusually for a criminal defence lawyer, his practice includes representing the victims, or the families of murdered victims, and the use of innovative legal strategies to achieve justice. The Zahid Mubarek inquiry, investigating the death of Zahid Mubarek who had been murdered by his racist cellmate in prison, denounced the institutional racism of the prison service. His practice includes representing defendants charged with terrorist offences, and he’s seen the sharp end of police questioning defendants detained for up to 28 days in Paddington Green. Socialist Lawyer published a lengthy interview with him in January 2008, at the same time as he addressed a packed meeting of the Society, where he vividly described the pressure that results from continued detention: ‘When I go to Paddington police station, after ten days I feel pretty awful and that’s me walking in and out of the police station. But being held there, in that sort of condition where you are isolated, you don’t speak to anybody, you get very little reading material, that sense of isolation is such that it would lead to people making false confessions’.

The unusual experience of having represented both victims and defendants, together with his anti-racist and socialist beliefs, allows him to navigate the most complex of civil liberties issues. Here’s just one example, when asked about enhanced sentences for terrorism-related offences: ‘This is complicated because I was certainly in favour of stiffer penalties when there was a racist element to an offence. However, the reason why we were asking for increased sentences in race-related crimes was because it was part of a campaign to force the police to take action in those sort of cases. We’re not living in the sort of environment where the courts and the prosecuting authorities are reluctant to investigate and prosecute offences where there is a terrorist element’. This is no kneejerk radical, but a thoughtful, committed and campaigning lawyer who understands the uses and limitations of the law.

Kate Markus is interviewed in this issue of Socialist Lawyer. A barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, she started her professional life at Brent Community Law Centre and was Chair of the Law Centres Federation for many years. Since joining Doughty Street in 1994, she has appeared in a range of notable cases. Her principal area of practice is in community care public law cases, but she’s also acted in control order and other terrorism- related cases. She’s been a long-standing activist in the Haldane Society.

Gareth Peirce has the most extraordinary list of achievements to her name. Her miscarriage of justice cases include the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, and Judith Ward. Like Imran, she’s prepared to act for victims of crime and her current clients include the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, battling for the Metropolitan police to be held accountable for de Menezes’ murder. And like Imran, her current practice includes representing defendants charged with terrorist-related offences. Ask any young radical lawyer who she or he emulates, and the answer is likely to be Gareth. What those young lawyers don’t realise, however, is that Gareth took on these cases long before they became glamorous. When Gareth was first approached by the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, nobody in the legal profession had believed in their innocence, all their appeal rights had been exhausted and they were widely considered to be terrorist murderers. It took a lot of patient, time-consuming work chasing avenues of inquiry that often proved fruitless before enough evidence emerged even for legal aid to be granted, let alone for the courts to consider fresh appeals.

There was no reason to believe, in the mid- 1980s, that these cases would be groundbreaking, both for the innocent men who were eventually released as a result of Gareth’s work, and for future rules governing disclosure, fairness etc. Like Imran, Gareth is outspoken both on behalf of her clients and around the issues of civil liberties, transparency and accountability raised by her cases. Writing in the London Review of Books earlier this year, she set out the injustices visited on the Muslim community since 19th December 2001, when internment was introduced to the British mainland and a dozen foreign nationals were locked up indefinitely. Gareth has represented clients at the sharp end of all the draconian ‘war on terror’ measures introduced by the Government: indefinite detention, control orders, deporting foreign nationals on the ‘understanding’ that they won’t be subject to torture, British citizens kidnapped and held in Guantánamo Bay without legal rights. She’s uniquely placed not only to describe the legal processes but also the effects on individuals caught in these legal black holes: mental breakdowns, family crises, and the stigmatising of the Muslim community. Gareth’s commitment to her clients goes much further than piloting their legal strategies (that, in itself, is not easy since all of her cases involve uncharted legal territory). She’s available day and night for them. Moazzam Begg describes his release from Guantánamo Bay and return to London in his book Enemy Combatant: so that he can spend his first night with his family in private, Gareth gives up her house to them, and she and her husband find a hotel for the night. I can’t think of many other lawyers who would do that for their clients.

Liz Davies is a barrister at Garden Court Chambers and Chair of the Haldane Society

This article can be found in the print edition of Socialist Lawyer number 50, September 2008.