Red Pepper » Liz Davies

Defending human rights defenders

James O'Nions — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:04:49 +0000

Human rights lawyers in Britain may face the scorn of the Daily Mail and David Cameron, but we don’t get killed for our activities. Elsewhere in the world the decision to devote one’s professional skills to the defence of human rights means taking real risks – putting life, liberty, family and livelihoods on the line.
The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) in the Philippines is committed to using legal strategies to stand up for the marginalised and oppressed – rural communities, workers, fishing communities, the urban poor, indigenous communities, political groups and human rights defenders. They are currently representing the families of two ‘disappeared’ students.
Part of that process has involved issuing a warrant for the arrest of retired major general Jovito Palparan, a fugitive who is avoiding prosecution and shielded by the authorities.
They represent the Morong 43, health workers who, while carrying out medical training, were accused of being members of the New People’s Army, arrested and detained in appalling conditions for 10 months without any trial. They are still fighting to clear their names.
An accusation that human rights defenders are really terrorists is just one of the weapons used by repressive states to silence their critics. But the NUPL finds itself defending its own members as well as its clients. Twenty-seven lawyers have been killed extra-judicially since January 2001.
Attorney Juvy Magsino of Mindoro, a vocal advocate against military abuses and mining projects, was riddled with bullets while driving her car. Attorney Tersita Vidamo was handling controversial land and labour disputes at the time she was shot.
Lawyer members of the NUPL were among the dead in the infamous Maguindanao massacre in November 2009 when 58 people including 34 journalists were killed by political opponents. NUPL secretary-general Edre Olalia says: ‘In the Philippines, the security forces pound on the lawyers, especially human rights lawyers.’
Human rights defenders from the Philippines, Dagestan, Belarus, Colombia, Palestine, Swaziland and Syria will be coming together at an event on 24 February, Defending Human Rights Defenders. Organised by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers in association with Amnesty International and European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights and supported by solidarity campaigns, the conference will consider extra-judicial killings, censorship, imprisonment and criminalisation.
The delegates will have an opportunity to share experiences and publicise their struggles. Most importantly, we will discuss how we can provide practical solidarity to all of our comrades who regularly challenge human rights abuses, and have to face the state acting with impunity.
While it is true that in mainland Britain, lawyers, journalists and other activists can stand up for human rights without fear of significant consequences, in Northern Ireland that was not the case. We remember our comrades Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, who were murdered for the crime of representing their clients, as well as journalists and other activists who lost their lives in defence of human rights. This conference is dedicated to their memories, as well as those we have lost around the world.

For more on the conference, see the website of the Haldane Society. A version of this blog post was originally published in the Morning Star.

A Scottish tragedy

James O'Nions — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 13:42:51 +0000

In May 2003, the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) won six Scottish Parliamentary seats with 245,735 votes (4.7%). This was an extraordinary achievement. The party was democratic, vibrant, led by committed socialists and feminists and its most famous representative, Tommy Sheridan, had made an impact as the sole SSP MSP before 2003.
In November 2004, Sheridan admitted to a stunned meeting of the SSP executive that he was the ‘married MSP’ whom the News of the World (NoW) had accused of frequenting swingers’ clubs. Worse, he was going to bring a libel claim, denying it and going to court telling a lie. Twenty-one people sat shocked, some crying. They agreed unanimously that Sheridan should be asked to reconsider. Sheridan’s response was to resign as leader, and to begin a campaign of vilification against his former friends and comrades.
Those who knew the truth desperately tried to protect Sheridan’s confidentiality. The minutes of the meeting – in a format that had been the SSP’s standard practice – were approved at the following meeting and then kept secret. McCombes himself was imprisoned for contempt after he refused to hand the copy over to the Court and the NoW’s lawyers.
The NoW summonsed those who had attended the executive meeting to give evidence at the libel trial. They all appeared under compulsion, prefacing their evidence that they were there unwillingly. Having been forced to attend Court, they did the only thing possible and the right thing: 11 witnesses told the truth about Sheridan’s admission at the meeting. Sheridan’s response was to accuse his former friends/comrades of conspiring against him, forging minutes, and committing perjury. Sheridan has now been convicted of perjury.
Since the libel trial, the 11 SSP witnesses have faced vilification – from being called ‘scabs’ by Sheridan in the Daily Record, to the hatred of left, mainly male, commentators on the web. The women were branded ‘witches’ and humourless puritanical feminists. What else could they have done? Refusing to attend Court would have landed them in prison. If they had tried to lie on oath, inconsistencies would have been exposed under cross-examination and they would have been committing perjury. This was not the state dragging a socialist into court. Socialist Sheridan had initiated the libel case, and expected his former friends to back him in those lies.
It was Sheridan who was engaging in Puritan morality by pretending to be a stably-married man whilst leading a double life of affairs and patronising sex clubs. It was Sheridan who, when he realised that 21 people knew that the libel case would be a lie, conspired to create factions within the SSP. Organised revolutionary groups, the Militant/CWI and SWP, were delighted to help him abuse a SSP leadership which believed in democracy, feminism and independent thinking. McCombes’ account of their behaviour and disregard for moral principles rings true with any of us who have ever tried to work with those groups.
What about the argument that socialists should always support socialists against Murdoch (or the police or the state)? Or that Sheridan is such an electoral asset that the SSP should back him come what may? Taking a libel case on the basis of a lie back-fires: look at Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken. If the SSP had backed Sheridan, they too would now be in prison for perjury and the SSP would be even more devastated than it is today. And, fundamentally, it is wrong to lie.
The SSP had a duty to protect its party – not from Murdoch but from Sheridan. Some have criticised the minutes secretary for taking the minutes to the police. It was Sheridan who had raised the prospect of a criminal investigation as he accused his former comrades of giving perjured evidence. The police were investigating all the witnesses. Of course the minutes secretary had the right to protect herself and her comrades and to clear their names.
McCombes has been criticised for giving a rival newspaper a sworn affidavit at the time of the executive meeting. The affidavit backed up an off-the-record conversation in which McCombes had said that Sheridan’s resignation was not for his stated reasons, but said nothing more.
Given what we know about NoW, it’s possible that Sheridan’s phone was hacked. It’s also possible that the News of the World witnesses, including Andy Coulson, who gave evidence about News of the World procedures at Sheridan’s perjury trial were not telling the truth. We wait and see. However, Sheridan was not brought down by phone-hacking. He was brought down by his own double life, and his decision to lie under oath in order to protect that double life.
The last six years have been years of hell for the SSP members who were forced to give evidence and those who supported them. They haven’t been pleasant for Sheridan and his supporters either, but all that stems from the reckless and egocentric decision to bring a libel case on the basis of a lie – and then to pull no punches when friends and comrades disagreed. We now have at least three socialist parties in Scotland. Their combined vote in May 2011 was 32,091. Obviously voters turn away from a party whose former leader has made himself a laughing stock and who accused his former comrades of lying. It’s the lies, not the sex, that voters mind.
McCombes was one of Sheridan’s closest comrades from the mid-1980s until 2004. They built the SSP together. McCombes had the strategic insight, Sheridan the oratory and charisma. McCombes’ account is painful to read and must have been almost unbearable, but also necessary, to write. The book – like those witnesses at the libel trial – tells the truth.

Downfall: the Tommy Sheridan story by Alan McCombes is published by Birlinn.

Trespassers will be prosecuted

James O'Nions — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 21:30:06 +0000

Occupations like the one at UCL last year could become criminal offences under the government’s proposals.

The Ministry of Justice is consulting on proposals to criminalise squatting with the intention of introducing amendments to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill in October.

In launching the consultation however, ministers were anything but open-minded as to the outcome. Justice minister Crispin Blunt said: ‘I am clear that the days of so-called squatters’ rights must end and squatters who break the law receive a proper punishment.’ Meanwhile housing minister Grant Shapps said he would tip ‘the scales of justice in favour of the law-abiding homeowner once and for all.’

The idea that squatters break into people’s homes while they are out at the shops is a right-wing media myth. It simply doesn’t happen – and one of the reasons why is because squatting someone’s home is already a criminal offence. Other reasons are that squatting someone’s home is anti-social and ineffective.

Shapps’s ‘law-abiding home-owner’ is already well protected. What the government is trying to do is to make it a criminal offence to squat an empty, non-residential building. Even without the support of the criminal law, owners of empty non-residential buildings are not exactly at a disadvantage. They can obtain possession orders from the courts very quickly and instruct bailiffs to remove squatters. When squats keep going for weeks, months or even years, it’s not because the law is somehow ‘pro-squatter’. It’s because the owner hasn’t bothered to get a court order to remove them.

Criminalising squatting raises all sorts of problems. First, some people squat who would otherwise be homeless and housed by local authorities. Second, the police are notoriously reluctant to intervene in what they see as housing disputes. Housing law is notoriously complex and the standard police response is to say to all concerned: ‘Let the civil courts sort it out.’ Third, it’s impossible to criminalise squatting – where people want a home – without also criminalising other forms of trespass, such as occupations.

Should workers who non-violently occupy their workplace or students who occupy academic buildings be criminalised? They are already subject to civil law – the employer or academic institution can obtain a possession order. Should the employer be entitled to send the police in to remove a non-violent occupation? No doubt the Tories think so, but do the rest of us?

What criminalising squatting will certainly do is act as a deterrent. At the moment, all that squatters risk is that they may be evicted in a few days’ time. However, if the landowner can call the police and have squatters immediately arrested and removed, far fewer people will take that risk.

And that would be a shame because squatting empty buildings helps to house people and maintain the building at the same time. Criminalising trespass will also deter legitimate political protest, such as occupations, peace camps or climate camp-type events.

The Ministry of Justice’s consultation closes on 5 October. Responses can be sent to: squatting.consultation@justice.gsi.gov.uk. There’s an extensive lobby group in favour of criminalising squatting, so the opposite view needs to be voiced loud and clear.

A hard case

admin — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:34:28 +0000

Legal aid gets a bad press from politicians and the right-wing media. But the £350 million proposed cut from the legal aid budget of £2.1 billion isn’t going to hit ‘fat cat’ lawyers. It’s the public who will suffer as access to free advice and representation on housing, family, immigration and asylum cases is slashed.
As far as public services go, traditionally it’s hard to convince the public to fight for legal aid. Given that only 29 per cent of the population are entitled to receive such aid if they have a legal problem, the public might wonder why they should campaign for a service that most of them anyway can’t use.
Legal aid is paid to lawyers in private practice, a consequence of the 1945 Labour government failing to bite the bullet and establish a National Legal Service. Lawyers tend to get a bad press, and there are a few top criminal barristers who earn substantial amounts. However, legal aid lawyers aren’t fat cats. The average salary of a legal aid lawyer in 2009 was £25,000.
A further difficulty in gathering public support for legal aid is that it pays for hard cases, many of which feel far removed from the everyday lives of taxpayers. If you read the Daily Mail, the only people who receive legal aid are asylum seekers, prisoners or foreigners. But they have rights, as does anyone facing criminal charges, having to deal with a difficult divorce or fighting to keep a home from being repossessed.
Moreover, no one is entitled to receive civil legal aid for cases without merit. There isn’t a merits test for criminal legal aid – and that’s entirely right. When someone’s liberty is at stake, it’s for magistrates or a jury to decide if he or she is guilty, not anonymous legal aid officials deciding whether he or she should get legal representation.
Despite the bad press it gets, though, campaigns to save legal aid are beginning to gain wider public support, broadening out beyond the legal profession. That’s because legal aid is a bit like the NHS – nobody wants to have to use it, but we know that if we are made redundant, can’t afford our rent or mortgage, or have a difficult family break-up, we need legally-aided advice and representation. We’re glad it’s there.
Save Legal Aid (www.savelegalaid.org) is supported by organisations representing legal aid practitioners. Together with Unite and Citizens’ Advice Bureaux, it has set up Justice for All to defence existing legal aid and advice services. A launch is planned for early December 2010.
The Haldane Society (www.haldane.org), together with Young Legal Aid Lawyers (www.younglegalaidlawyers.org), is holding an inquiry into the case for legal aid on 2 February 2011. The event will contain testimony from people who have benefited from legal aid, as well as those who were refused legal aid and couldn’t afford a lawyer.
Campaigns to defend and extend legal aid should be integral parts of campaigns to defend public services. If our campaign doesn’t reach beyond the legal profession, we won’t succeed. We need trade unions, anti-cuts groups, community and voluntary groups to be campaigning as vigorously against legal aid cuts as they do for all the other public services.

A friend in court

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:58:28 +0000

A glance through Michael Mansfield’s cases – many resulting in the release of innocent people from serving jail sentences for crimes that they did not commit – confirms that he’s earned his reputation. Moreover, Mansfield understands that courtroom victories themselves are never going to change the world, and places himself squarely within political movements for radical change.

After training, Mansfield very quickly became a defence lawyer, specialising initially in drugs possession cases and supplementing his practice with volunteer work at addict centres. It seems to have been this experience that radicalised him. He has drawn on John Stuart Mill to argue that acts which do not encroach on the life or liberty of someone else should not be criminalised. Mansfield is also known for developing bonds with his clients and keeping in touch with them. As a result he knows the human cost of miscarriages of justice.

His career has included some of the most famous trials in the past 30 years. He’s best known for the tenacious legal and political campaigns that exonerated the Birmingham Six, the Bridgewater Three, the Tottenham Three, the Cardiff Three, Judith Ward and Angela Cannings, after having served years for crimes that they had not committed.

In the legal profession, he is best known for his meticulous questioning of forensic evidence and his challenging of assumptions. Mansfield’s successful appeal of the Angela Cannings case – in which she had been convicted of murdering her children after the genetic predisposition of her children to infant mortality was overlooked – set a legal precedent against such cases being swayed by statistical evidence alone.

After the death of Stephen Lawrence, Mansfield and Imran Khan had to develop new legal skills. Suddenly these defence lawyers became prosecutors, trying to convict Lawrence’s murderers when the police had failed to do so. They eventually held the police and the murderers accountable through the Macpherson Inquiry, rather than in the courtroom. Significantly, they forced a retired high court judge, well-known for his illiberal opinions, to understand and uphold the concept of institutional racism.

The book is a riveting read. It’s full of great detail about the process of cross-examination, the fallibility of scientific evidence and the human stories behind the legal details. Mansfield says he’s retiring from legal practice, but let’s wait and see.

Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer is available for purchase here.

Why stay?

admin — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 21:57:21 +0000

I’ve been struck by the lack of analysis on the Labour left as to what went wrong in the recent Labour leadership elections. This is the first attempt to provide such an analysis and I welcome it. All I’ve seen before now is the Labour left congratulating themselves on the campaign itself and then bemoaning ‘we was robbed’. All of us who want to challenge the bipartisan approach of the two major parties were robbed. But what does that mean and why did it happen?

John McDonnell ran an exemplary campaign. It reached out to the grassroots, was based on transparency and accountability, and put forward a manifesto of principled, pragmatic socialist strategies. A contest between him and Gordon Brown would have meant that trade union and Labour Party members had a real political choice – a neoliberal warmonger against a democrat and a socialist. It’s a contest that Brown would have hated and that’s why MPs were mobilised to prevent McDonnell standing.

In comparison, Jon Cruddas’s bid for deputy leader was a pale imitation. His vote reflected the fact that a certain proportion of Labour Party members (and a much higher proportion of trade union members) don’t support New Labour. But Alan Simpson is right to point to Cruddas’s poor voting record. Compass – his main base – was one of the building blocks of New Labour. Cruddas’s response when asked on Question Time which piece of legislation passed under Blair he would repeal – he couldn’t initially think of anything – showed his loyalist instincts.

I don’t believe, as Alan Simpson suggests, that the Labour left declined because of the Chesterfield conferences 20 years ago or because we were too fragmented. The Labour left lost because New Labour won, building on the right-wing shift started by Neil Kinnock. New Labour capitalised on the party’s despair after the 1992 election defeat and convinced too many party members that only New Labour would make the party electable – and that becoming electable required shutting down the party’s democratic structures (such as they were), preventing the left having a voice in the party, and promoting neoliberal values.

Many party members – and many Labour voters in 1997 – believed that this was a smokescreen to get into power. But Tony Blair was speaking the truth when he said ‘We were elected as New Labour and we shall govern as New Labour.’ Since his election as party leader in 1994, the Labour Party has become the party of privatisation, authoritarianism, war and racism. Thatcher’s greatest achievement has been to re-mould the Labour Party in her own image. Gordon Brown was as much an architect of New Labour as Blair, and the ideology of New Labour continues under his premiership.

When New Labour shut down the democratic structures, it ended any chance of socialists in the Labour Party being able to make a difference. No matter how many party members are horrified by war, privatisation, the assault on civil liberties and so on, their voices aren’t heard, and they certainly can’t change the policies. The leadership’s iron grip prevents any real challenges – just as it did with McDonnell’s bid for leadership.

It’s not surprising, then, that the party membership has changed. Jon Cruddas’s vote showed that it’s now predominantly trade union members – not Labour Party members – who are dissatisfied with the leadership. Given that McDonnell’s exemplary campaign couldn’t even get the left off the starting-block, the question must be asked: what can the Labour left possibly achieve by staying in the party?