Letter from Canterbury
[Editor’s Note: Donald Trump isn’t the only government official accused of inciting violence against his own countryfolk. Sian Lewis-Anthony is a human rights lawyer and senior lecturer at Kent Law School in England. She was one of many lawyers who reacted furiously to this tweet from the Home Office a couple of months ago:
Small boat crossings are totally unnecessary and we continue to return migrants with no right to be in the UK. Another flight left today with more planned in the coming weeks. We are working to remove migrants with no right to remain in the UK. But current return regulations are rigid and open to abuse, allowing activist lawyers to delay and disrupt returns. Soon we will no longer be bound by EU laws and can negotiate our own return arrangements.
Home Secretary Priti Patel doubled down in a speech this month by equating lawyers who defend the rights of migrants and asylum-seekers to human traffickers:
No doubt those who are well-rehearsed in how to play and profit from the broken system will lecture us on their grand theories about human rights. Those defending the broken system – the traffickers, the do-gooders, the lefty lawyers, the Labour party – they are defending the indefensible.
Now the lawyers are looking at defending themselves and their clients from further verbal attacks that can magnetize hatred against them. One immigration lawyer has already been the target of a thwarted knife attack.
The following was Lewis-Anthony’s own furious reaction to the original Home Office tweet.]
The Home Office has sunk to new levels of disingenuousness in a tweet today, by depicting lawyers as somehow subverting the state’s efforts in deporting alleged irregular migrants. It is engaged in an ugly war of words that pits an always law-abiding state against an enemy invasion, not of armed warriors, but defenceless, desperate humans, whose sole aim is to find somewhere safe to live and bring up their families. Let us be clear – if bombs were falling on our homes, or murderous paramilitaries were hell-bent on eradicating us and our families, we would doubtless also be taking to the seas in whatever vessels were to hand. We would doubtless also fall into the hands of unscrupulous smugglers and traffickers, who would mercilessly exploit our vulnerabilities for their own considerable financial gain. Our lives would be reduced to the clothes we have on our backs – or sometimes our lives would be lost in our desperate efforts to reach safety and the hope of a life without fear.
To suggest that lawyers — who seek to represent some of the most vulnerable people living in these islands — are subversive, is itself subversive. It suggests that laws passed by parliament are themselves subversive. It suggests that the rule of law — where no one, not even a government minister, is above the law — is also subversive. It is utterly shameful to depict the legal profession in this way. The Home Office needs to issue an immediate apology for its egregious hostility to the legal profession and by extension to those whose rights lawyers are trying valiantly to defend. Without an independent legal profession, there can be no rule of law, and powerful actors including state actors and criminal gangs, can never be held to account or brought to justice. The Home Office needs to stand by our legal system, our system of parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law – not seek to denigrate it in the eyes of the world.
[EDITOR’S UPDATE: On 25 October, the premier British daily newspaper, The Guardian, published a letter signed by eight hundred two practicing lawyers, legal academics, and retired judges who “invite” Home Secretary Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “behave honourably by apologising for their display of hostility” to “lawyers seeking to hold the government to the law.” (Spelling and civility peculiar to the UK).
“Such attacks,” they wrote, “endanger not only the personal safety of lawyers and others working for the justice system,” but also “undermine the rule of law which ministers and lawyers alike are duty bound to uphold.”
Signers included three retired justices of the UK Supreme Court, five retired lord justices of appeal, six other high court judges, and hundreds of barristers and solicitors, law professors, and other legal academics, Sian Lewis-Anthony among them.
They await the RSVP to their invitation.]