Inside the Sean Rigg Inquest

Eight months on from the inquest into the death in police custody of Sean Rigg, Leslie Thomas gives an inside account of the case and why it is that he has dedicated much of his career to inquest work.

Writing in Counsel magazine, Leslie Thomas explains that while inquest work is “not an area chosen for financial rewards”, it is rewarding , challenging and always interesting. During Leslie’s career at the Bar, one of the greatest changes has been the implementation of the Human Rights Act, which for the first time guaranteed the families of those who died in state custody a full and far-reaching inquest.

Leslie Thomas

Leslie Thomas features in the latest issue of Black Mental Health UK’s The Soloution magazine.

The latest edition includes a feature on the Leslie’s legal career which has included historic cases such as the case of Wayne Douglas and the case of Ibrahim Sey.

Describing his commitment to this type of work Leslie is said to have ‘battled for justice for relatives of these families, often facing David and Goliath odds making it clear his commitment to be a ‘voice of power’ for society’s most voiceless groups.’

Speaking of his intentions in representing marginalised groups Leslie said ‘I wanted to represent the small person.  That is what I have always wanted to do.’

The Solution online digital magazine is written and published by human rights campaigns group Black Mental Health UK (BMH UK). Click here to read the article.

Why secret justice is bad for Britain

As Parliament prepares to vote on the Justice and Security Bill today, Terry McGuinness outlines why Closed Material Procedures (CMP) are an affront to open justice.

Sami al Saadi was a long way from home when in March 2004 Colonel Gaddafi’s agents finally caught up with him. Along with his wife and children, the dissident was kidnapped in Hong Kong and forced onto a plane bound for Libya. Upon arriving in their homeland the whole family was initially imprisoned and the long detention and torture of Mr al Saadi began. The rendition of a whole family to the torture chambers of the Gaddafi dictatorship was made possible due to a joint operation involving British and American intelligence services.

Syria’s legal fight amid the gunfire

Forced to flee the country after standing up to Assad, Syria’s radical lawyers are now working to protect human rights in rebel-held areas. But the longer conflict continues, the harder it will be to keep progressive voices heard, reports Taimour Lay from Antakya

Ahmed Hassoun first crossed back into Syria in August 2012, through the mountains at nightfall from Turkey where he had spent a year as a refugee. As a firm supporter of the revolution against President Bashar al-Assad, he travelled with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) but carried no gun and wore no uniform.

At risk of attack from mortars and fighter jets, Hassoun (pictured, left) arrived at a town in rebel-held Idlib province to perform a task many see as a quixotic, even counter-revolutionary, distraction from the armed struggle: he went to defend 12 men in an ad hoc FSA court accused of supporting the Assad regime.

“I did it because they’re human and because I’m a lawyer and if someone needs to be defended I’ll defend them,” Hassoun tells me, claiming the men were eventually released by a tribunal that included an Islamic scholar. But he worries about what happened to them next. “If we don’t try to apply legal process, the revolution will look as bad as the regime. Some in the FSA realise this and they invite us in. Others do not.”

Which human rights would you discard?

As the late Lord Bingham said in 2009  (see link to his lecture):

‘The rights protected by the Convention and the Act deserve to be protected because they are, as I would suggest, the basic and fundamental rights which everyone in this country ought to enjoy simply by virtue of their existence as a human being.

Let me briefly remind you of the protected rights, some of which I have already mentioned.

The right to life.

The right not to be tortured or subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The right not to be enslaved.

The right to liberty and security of the person.

The right to a fair trial.

The right not to be retrospectively penalised.

The right to respect for private and family life.

Freedom of thought,conscience and religion.  Freedom of expression.

Freedom of assembly and association.

The right to marry.

The right not to be discriminated against in the enjoyment of those rights.

The right not to have our property taken away except in the public interest and with compensation.

The right of fair access to the country’s educational system.

The right to free elections.

Which of these rights, I ask, would we wish to discard? Are any of them trivial, superfluous, unnecessary? Are any them un-British?

There may be those who would like to live in a country where these rights are not protected, but I am not of their number.

Human rights are not, however, protected for the likes of people like me – or most of you. They are protected for the benefit above all of society’s outcasts, thosewho need legal protection because they have no other voice – the prisoners, the mentally ill, the gipsies, the homosexuals, the immigrants, the asylum-seekers, those who are at any time the subject of public obloquy. ‘

Crime, Rehabilitation and the Right to Private Life: where should the “Bright line” fall?

Shereener Browne analyses the recent decision in T, R (on the application of) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester & Ors and its impact on employment law.

In 1974, the passing into law of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act saw an important principle enshrined in statute: that people who have committed certain offences some time ago should, generally speaking be allowed to keep those misdemeanours in their past. At the heart of this legislation was the recognition that an individual’s future should not be blighted by what may often have been a rash decision made in the blush of youth.

Wear What You Like

Following today’s European Court of Human Rights judgment in Eweida and Others v the United Kingdom, David Renton analyses the how the fine balance between religious freedom and avoiding discrimination can be struck.

Employment law is often enough in the news; but it remains unusual to see government ministers side unambiguously with an appellant to the European Court of Human Rights, as David Cameron did, in the build up to today’s decision concerning Nadaia Eweida and three other Christians (Lilian Ladele, Shirley Chaplin, and Gary McFarlane) promising that if Nadaia Eweid and Shirley Chaplin lost he would change UK law to protect them.