Law – Lawmanity

Transcript: Equal under the Law: What does Justice Look Like? (Pt 3)

Jen — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 08:19:33 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Davie Donaldson

“..but at the very baseline of all of this is the fact that everybody in Scotland should be allowed to live respectfully and in a dignified way, right?

And for gypsy travellers, that means we want to experience our culture, our indigenous culture that’s been passed down by our ancestors for generation after generation. We want to ensure that our children and the next generation get to hear the stories and songs which link us to the landscape.”

Jen Ang

Hello and welcome to a special series of three podcasts – part of our Equal Under the Law? Series – which explores three big questions about the complex relationship between the law and social justice, through interviews with some of Scotland’s most inspiring and impactful activists campaigning today.

Over the past few months, we have interviewed 11 guests for the Lawmanity podcast, who work across a range of social justice issues, including: LGBT+ rights, racial justice, migrants rights, Scottish travellers rights, disability justice, and the rights of women and girl survivors.

We asked each of our guests three big questions, because we wanted to understand what their personal experiences – whether drawn from just a few years’ of campaigning, or sometimes, over as many as four decades of activism – told them about the relationship between law and justice.

Jen Ang

Today, we’re going to look the answers we got to our final question – and it’s a big one!

What does justice look like for you, or for your community?

Heather Fisken, Chief Executive Officer of Inclusion Scotland, a disabled peoples’ organisation (DPO) – opened by pointing out how we will know that we have truly achieved justice:

Heather Fisken

Well, I suppose that goes to justice, achieve justice in practice. When it’s happening, we wouldn’t have a need for justice because would be no injustice.

Sorry, I’m not lawyer, so that’s the kind of thing I would say.

Jen Ang

And Heather goes onto describe justice for disabled people:

Heather Fisken

So justice would look like ready availability of support, and a willingness to see the law as a route that is accessible, attainable, appropriate, when it is – and something that’s for you, it’s for everybody.

Jen Ang

Tressa Burke, Chief Executive Officer of Glasgow Disability Alliance, expands this into a compelling vision of what justice looks like for disabled people across Scotland, for her and her colleagues

Tressa Burke

So, I’ll take it from a broader perspective first. So social justice for disabled people, and if they were having all their legal rights realised and fulfilled, would be about having access to a meaningful life and a life of purpose and a life of choices.

It would be about participation. It would be about being included in their communities and their families in wider society. It would be about having a job, a job that pays well, a job where the employer knows what access to work is, the scheme itself, the programme of support, but also what access in the workplace means.

It would be about disabled people not living in abject and deep and long-term poverty. It would be about disabled people you know accessing the health and social care services that they need.

So you know in terms of social justice, it would be all of those things: fairness, freedom, having dignity, having choices, and the same choices as non-disabled people take for granted.

So when we are talking about choices like that, Sometimes disabled people aren’t able to choose when they get up, what they wear, if they wear anything, when they have a shower, if they have a shower. We’re frequently told about disabled people being told that they’re only entitled to so many showers a week, or a month. I’ve got disabled people who lost their social care packages at the outset of lockdown when 1,884 packages were cut by Glasgow City Council and other local authorities around Scotland, but that’s the figure they themselves gave to the BBC in April 2020. And they haven’t all been reinstated, and many not reinstated at all, and all of them requiring new assessments and people being told: “You coped then, how can you not cope now?”

So, I mean, these are the types of, you know, breaches to human rights that we’re talking about.

I think for disabled people to have justice, both legally and in in that wider fairness and social justice way, not only would they have those things, but if they didn’t have them, there would be better complaint systems.

They would be transparent. They would be independent before you even got to the legal situation. And then, of course, you would be able to access the legal system. You would know the lawyers to go to because it wouldn’t just be one or two that might be good because they’re good people or, you know, somebody that’s married to a disabled person or because we do have examples of that. …

You know, and that’s how desperate things can be. So it would be much more readily available access and it would be affordable because people would be able to access it through legal aid.

But hopefully things would be better than needing to take it to the legal route because you would be able to have your complaints or your issues resolved at an earlier stage and that sense of fairness and freedom and would be observed and realised.

I think you know it’s not to be ignored how difficult things are for local authorities. But when people in Glasgow are now referring to feeling as brutalised by social work and social work assessments and how they are treated, not in every case by any means.

So it local authorities are struggling for sure. And local government funding is definitely an issue. But it is about choices. And disability is a political and a social and economic choice. And disabled people need to be prioritised. So I know that’s a long-winded answer, but these are the ways that disabled people’s lives would look if they were, you know, having their rights and their freedoms observed and realised, and we would have access to that redress, which at this point in time we just don’t have.

Jen Ang

As for how to get there, Pheona Matovu, Founding Director of Radiant & Brighter who also works with racialised and migrant families, believes it is crucial that the people who are impacted by policies are brought to the table, to help design our future legal system.

Pheona Matovu

That’s a big question, very big question. I couldn’t possibly say that I know. What I can say is that I know how that could be achieved.

And even then, maybe I think I know, but I think for it to look how we want it to look, it requires engagement for my community, for the communities that I work with, for the local communities I engage with, people who are affected by poverty, people are affected by migration, people are affected…

When you think, for example, about migration, right? People in these Western countries who can travel to every part of the world do not actually stop to think that they can travel to every part of the world, many times.

There is sometimes an assumption that the immigration law works for everybody the same way. But I know – as a black woman who had to come from Africa – I understand that the hoops that you have to jump through to even just go and pay an education, for an education even that, is significantly, .. it takes everything out of you. It takes everything out of your family.

And they can choose to say, no, you are not coming. And guess what? Your money is lost. And that’s not just a little bit of money. That’s thousands of money usually.

And so I think we need to redesign in a way that we are engaging everybody, in a way that is healthy and dignified for everybody.

And I don’t think that that’s happening. So I think we need to consider bringing other people to the table, perhaps even those people being the core elements and the core designers of what we are looking at, particularly if it is going to affect them the most.

Jen Ang

And Satwat Rehman, Founding Director of One Parent Families Scotland, agrees – explaining what this looks like for single parent families:

Satwat Rehman

Okay, I want to start small, then build big. I think dignity, fairness and equity.

Do you know if people can actually experience those things in the single parent community, not just in the law, but also the fact that what’s in law can drive how society behaves, you’d begin to see the beginnings of justice, alright?

Because if you have that, if you have equity and justice as the cornerstones, then and you build up from there, you should be actively designing poverty out of your systems, alright?

You should be actively designing sort of things I’ve spoken about in education for families, it would be like the law would recognise that there is more than one type of family and they’re all equally valid.

They’re all equally important, but actually they require different things, and that should be the cornerstone for me.

Over and above, that it would be great if we had accessible, responsive legal systems that protect our rights without making us jump through hoops. That would be great.

Yes, a voice in actually shaping policies and understanding what the laws are behind those policies and how you can influence them as they’re being designed and not feel excluded from them because of the language and the process, would be really important.

Jen Ang

Talat Yaqoob, political commentator, activist and co-Chair of the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls (NACWG) tackles this question from a different angle, the perspective of what making law just could look like.

Talat Yaqoob

Wow. Okay, so what does law as injustice look like for the community I do? You know what I have to say that I think if, if we can use law as a way to redistribute power, that would be justice.

That’s not, that’s not the way in which we think about law and write law. A lot of law is written as in a reactionary way. An issue has occurred, a law is required. This is what will be done in the future, and it is focused deeply on criminalisation. It’s focused on and I know that sounds like of course it is, but actually no the thinking around it about the realisation of rights and law as a tool to redistribute power, to create accountability. That is law that creates justice. That’s law that people can have more trust in, you know.

So if we think about things like, we’re in Scotland, the acts that we pass, the law that we implement, actually, regardless of whether it’s Scotland, UK, any nation, actually, if we’re we write law that centres the redistribution of power that centres the ability for accountability to be closer to people. That’s transformative. That’s transformative justice, in my in my view, that is social justice being realised to the law.

And for me, it’s about looking at the way in which law is written and the rationale with which new laws are created, the mindset behind that is what needs to change.

And if that can be more about redistribution, that can be more about transformation and social justice, in which laws we choose to prioritise, and the mindset behind them. I think, I think that would, that could, that could change the face of society in a radically short time.

And actually, it would make law and law making an accessible feature of society. But it’s about the mindset behind why law is created and what law is for, if we could do more about that, if we could do more to challenge that, that it doesn’t need to be this traditional, archaic view of what law is and why law exists, and that law is to pursue the criminalisation of society or the…or for a hierarchy to come and protect society rather than enabling the protection of itself. I think that would be transformative.

Jen Ang

Pinar Aksu, migrant rights activist, tells us that justice for the community she works with – migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees – looks like being treated equally, with humanity and dignity.

Pinar Aksu

For me is, I guess, justice within the migration – especially when you look at how there are so many violent policies being implemented on people – is for people to just live a normal life.

I would say, for me, that would be justice for people to just be treated as a human being and to live a normal life where they don’t have to go through many hurdles to prove themselves of who they are, where they don’t have to continuously go to give evidence at the Home Office, or where they don’t have to continuously fight for their rights within society and live with long term difference that’s been created in communities.

Yeah, I think just being treated as human being and to have a normal life, that, for me, would be justice and also to seen as equal. I think that’s the most important thing.

Jen Ang

For Davie Donaldson, Travellers rights activist, justice for his community looks like achieving equality and dignitiy in practice, but also recognition of the rights and validity of the traveller culture and way of life.

Davie Donaldson

Yeah, and it’s a question that I ask myself every time I visit a camp or every time that I’m speaking to someone who’s just experienced hate crime or someone who is terrified of losing their kids to social services and just doesn’t know how to how to go about even challenging decisions, right?

And because of that, I think justice… is something which is experienced on a really individual level. Justice is something that really relies upon former experience. It relies upon an acknowledgement of past trauma, both collective and individual.

But it also recognises that everyone has a right to live in a dignified and respected way, right? And that’s where our justice system falls short, right?

Let’s pull it right back. I mean, I’m really keen to talk about legal arguments and legal frameworks, but at the very baseline of all of this is the fact that everybody in Scotland should be allowed to live respectfully and in a dignified way, right?

It’s about knowing where you come from, learning your language, having the ability to come together as a community and experience your own sense of identity and your own sense belonging.

Currently, the justice system in Scotland is a barrier to all of that. Now, how justice would look, to paint a picture, I imagine, would be a gypsy traveller family would be able to travel unimpeded to their ancestral stopping places.

There would be significant and sustained support for gypsy travellers travelling and shifting, is our word for that, but shifting around the country. Basic support, access to basic sanitation, access to running water, access to refuse collection in bins, toilets.

You know, really basic human needs should be met in a just society. We should recognise and respect that there are very few nomadic communities left in the world, particularly in the Western world.

And so having a nomadic community in Scotland, like the gypsy travellers, is something that should be celebrated, it shouldn’t be impeded, right? I mean, living in a nomadic way, having a particular unique relationship to the landscape and the oral heritage of the land, is something that we should all want to celebrate, whether or not we’re gypsy travellers.

And to be able to travel and not worry about eviction, not have that constant stress, that constant feeling of surveillance every single time you move, knowing that local settled communities will respect your right to be there and will support you to be there in a safe and dignified manner.

You know, they won’t expect you to have to remove all of your rubbish and travel from place to place with these cartloads of rubbish because you can’t access a council recycling facility. Because if you burn the rubbish, you you’ll get charged because you aren’t provided any bins.

You know, they don’t expect you to have the toilet behind a hedge because they won’t provide you toilets or they’ll lock the public toilets you don’t get to access them, or they’ll refuse to allow you access to toilets in a local shop.

Dignity, you know, that’s what the justice system should look like. And I think if we move to a place where there are legal protections on the right for gypsy travellers to travel, it won’t only positively impact the gypsy traveller community, but it’ll positively impact the settled community as well, because it’ll allow that travelling to be done in a safer, and more community cohesive way.

Jen Ang

And to conclude this podcast today, here’s a reflection from Amanda Amaeshi, an activist with the Young Women’s Movement and a former law student at the University College, London (UCL), who speaks to what justice looks like from the perspective of someone aspiring to activism from within the legal system.

Amanda Amaeshi

Justice looks like a legal system, a political system that’s designed by women for like, the people that it aims to serve – especially those who are like most who are currently most vulnerable, most marginalised and furthest away from this power.

And it’s not just about like abstract legal principles or which are in legislations or in courtroom decisions, but it’s really about whether the people at the sharpest edges of injustice feel seen, heard and protected, like the example of like the clients from earlier, where they felt heard and empowered in regards to like their case.

And it’s really important that like justice has to be intersectional, has to be collective, it has to be rooted in empathy. And it’s really important that these don’t just become buzzwords like, they’re really like, essential core principles, and there has to be a commitment to listen, listening to communities, rather than just like, prescribing solutions based on like, based solely on like, labels that like might be like, put on them by society.

And I think especially like the idea of, like, empathy and humanity are really central to this vision. I feel like, throughout, throughout my law degree, like, sometimes it’s kind of, here’s what you have to focus on these very like intellectually see, like, quote, unquote, intellectually serious kind of ideas like rationality.

But I think throughout, like the three years, especially in the modules that I’ve taken in final year, like, it’s really helped me understand, like, this idea of, like empathy kind of is transformative, and it is as intellectually serious as, like, any other idea, and it’s a rigorous, necessary foundation for like legal for legal thinking and legal practice as well.

Another thing a part of like justice is that, something I see right now is that, like too often, like legal systems are shaped like by fear, and I’m thinking about like around the world, like the rollback of rights under pressure from like far right movement, and how, as a result, like in Scotland, in the UK, perhaps like laws or policies are becoming a bit weaker to kind of like in response to that.

But Justice has to be like, and also as well about like, issues of like equality and justice can easily be sidelined in terms of, like, self interested, like, party politics, um, but justice has to be braver than that.

It has to put people in their dignity at the centre of the conversation. It can’t just be like, moved aside because, like, it’s become politically inconvenient, like it should always be at the core of what anybody’s doing.

And as I’ve kind of already alluded to, like, I don’t think that law alone can carry this burden of like, striving for justice. It is definitely an important part, but I think justice requires more than just legal reform. It needs like, moral imagination, and sustained, inclusive activism.

And so law is a tool that must be wielded alongside, like storytelling, organising, mutual aid, like education, care, like all of these other kind of aspects, a lot of it comes from, like the community, and I think that’s how real change and real justice happens.

Jen Ang

And that concludes today’s episode, in which a number of prominent Scottish activists sat down to talk to us about what justice looks like for them, and for their communities, under the law. Some big ideas and inspiring visions here – which I hoped sparked some curious thinking on your part, the listener.

What does it mean if we hold a vision of justice that is separate to the law and the legal system as we know today? What is the impact for those who are excluded? And what about for the rest of us? Does the answer to bridging this gap lie within the law, or outside of it?

Big questions, and I’d love to hear what you, our listeners, make of it all, and indeed of this special three-part episode on equality under the law.

Meanwhile, a very big thank you to Heather Fisken, Tressa Burke, Pheona Matovu, Satwat Rehman, Talat Yaqoob, Pinar Aksu, Davie Donaldson and Amanda Amaeshi for their contributions to today’s episode.

And thanks so much to you, the listener for tuning into our Lawmanity podcast and our special series on Equality Under the Law in Scotland.

If you loved this podcast, please do hit the subscribe buttons, and also like and share our episodes with friends and colleagues who might enjoy learning a little bit about how law really works in practice, and how it can be used to make the world a better, brighter place.

Our Equality Under the Law series has been generously support by a grant from the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, hosted by the London School of Economics. The Lawmanity podcast is co-produced by me, your host, Jen Ang and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe. And the music you’ve been listening to is “Always on the Move” by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow-based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.

Thanks so much for tuning in today, we hope you enjoyed listening, and see you next time!

Transcript: Equal under the Law: Is the Law a Tool or a Barrier to Change? (Pt 2)

Jen — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:57:21 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Pheona Matovu

We need to reconsider what the law does. It’s in what it does, not in what it is.

What it is can be changed. We can rethink, we can remodel, we can redesign. We must consider that when these laws were put in place, perhaps the people that should have been in the rooms were not in the rooms.

Jen Ang

Over the past few months, we have interviewed 11 guests for the Lawmanity podcast, who work across a range of social justice issues, including: LGBT+ rights, racial justice, migrants’ rights, Scottish Travellers’ rights, disability justice, and the rights of women and girl survivors.

We asked each of our guests three big questions, because we wanted to understand what their personal experiences – whether drawn from just a few years of campaigning, or sometimes, over as many as four decades of activism – told them about the relationship between law and justice.

We also have a content warning for you: as mentioned, some of the activists we interviewed with work with women and girl survivors of violence and that means there are some references to sexual violence, including rape, in this episode.

Jen Ang

Today, we’re going to look the answers we got to our second question:

Is the law a barrier, or a tool (or both) in the struggle to achieve greater equality for people and communities that are marginalised and excluded?

Across the board, our guests told us that they saw the law as both a barrier and a tool for change.

Talat Yaqoob, political commentator, activist and co-chair of the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls believes the question of whether law is a barrier or a tool for social change, can only be answered by looking at the wider political and social context, at any given time.

Talat Yaqoob

So I think it can be both, but I think it is so deeply influenced by where society, people and politics is at the time.

So if you’d asked me a few years ago, I think I’d be much more secure in saying both. In the current political landscape that we’re in, where law is being very successfully used to demonise communities, either to eradicate rights that are in law, or to manipulate the interpretation of the law, or to change completely the law, implement new ones. Now I’m not just talking about America here. I am talking about here in the UK. We’re seeing it across Europe as well. The rise of far-right politics and populism actually uses the law to its advantage and exceptionally with exceptional strength, with exceptional clarity.

So with that influence right now, it feels more like a barrier than a positive tool. But it is so dependent on where society is, and I think that really reinforces how politics, how law, is not separate from politics and society.

Where we are as a society dictates what laws we prioritise, implement, write, and how they’re written, who they’re written by, all of those things. So I think, I still hold strong to the fact that it can be both, but it is so dependent on where politics and society is at the time.

Jen Ang

Similarly, other guests spoke about the function of the law and the legal system as essentially a neutral tool in the hands of different forces. The determining factor, therefore, being: Who is using the law? And for what purpose?

Pinar Aksu, a migrants’ rights activist and PhD student at the University of Glasgow had earlier spoken about the the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill 2025, passing through Parliament as an unjust law that benefitted some people, but harmed many others. She told us, for example:

Pinar Aksu

It depends who uses the law and how they use the law.

It’s a combination, because when we talk about migration, such as, right now, the new Borders Bill that’s been going through and being debated, that’s going to make things very difficult for a lot of people, and that is using the law.

And how can we challenge that is very difficult, I think, as activists, or even people who are lawyers themselves or by the general public, because I think we have reached a state, or we have reached a moment in the UK that becomes very difficult to intervene and challenge, and the government is able to just pass policies, just there and here, just like that.

And that, for me, is concerning for democracy, and it’s concerning for all of us.

How do you reverse that? How do you mobilise the whole community, the whole country, basically, to say what you’re, what you’ve written there, is wrong, and how do we, how do we change that?

Jen Ang

Tim Hopkins, LGBT+ activist and former director of the Equality Network, also sees the law as both a tool and a barrier in advocating for LGBT+ rights, again very much tied to how particular issues are seen in a political and social context. Reflecting on change he has seen as an activist from the 1980s to the present, he said:

Tim Hopkins

So I guess for LGBT people, obviously at the beginning when we started this work, the law was a big barrier because there were so many things that were wrong with it.

Section 28, sex offences law, treated gay men in particular very different from anybody else. There was no gender recognition for trans people, there was no recognition of same sex couples in any way, same sex couples couldn’t be joint parents. And then there was no protective law, so there was no equality law or hate crime law protection. So in that sense, the law was a big barrier.

As we’ve gradually got things changed, some of those changes were about barriers disappearing, so I wrote down that it took four separate acts, two of them at Westminster, and two of them in the Scottish Parliament, to remove all of the discrimination against gay and bisexual men in sexual offences law. It started in 1980, but it didn’t finish until 2009. So that was removing the barrier.

And then of course apart from removing all the barriers, I would include in that, you know, the introduction of civil partnership, and then the introduction of equal marriage, and actually before even civil partnership, the recognition of cohabiting same sex couples, and the laws around parenting.

All of that is about removing barriers, but there are also the more positive laws: the Equality Act and the hate crime legislation, which are about protecting people.

So I think the answer is the law has both been a barrier, a huge barrier, but for LGB people, those barriers have been bit by bit taken down. But also the law is a protector, and it has been genuinely protective: you know, the Equality Act has genuinely protected people. It doesn’t always work of course, but some people have been protected from sexual orientation discrimination, and hate crime law has given some people some justice.

But the law at the moment is a huge barrier for trans people, especially after the [For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers] Supreme Court judgment in April [2025]. Really, the situation of trans people now is I think worse than the situation was for LGB people, even going back to the 1980s. The legal situation, the fact that it looks like trans people are not going to be able to use toilets, is just appalling.

Jen Ang

Pheona Matovu, Founding Director of Radiant and Brighter, looking to her own experience, personally and professionally, working with racialised and migrant families, is firmly convinced that the law as it stands is designed to treat excluded and marginalised groups unequally, but also believes it can be redesigned to achieve inclusion and positive social change.

Pheona Matovu

My experience is that it’s more of a barrier. It can enable, but it is more of a barrier. And that’s not because it’s the law.

It’s because I think we need to reconsider what the law does. It’s in what it does, not in what it is.

And so at the point of design, the point of where the thinking was happening, there wasn’t enough critical thinking perhaps around equity. I do know I’m not a master of the law – I have, very little understanding of law in how it operates and how it’s designed, because I’m not a lawyer, but I am aware that women were not even allowed to be lawyers for a while, I believe.

And so if the very people that that that that have to adhere to the law are not in the room, what is being designed? And who is it being designed for? And for what?

So it’s in the design that there is a fault and therefore it creates barriers. It creates barriers where we are seeking to a society that’s engaging.

So here in Scotland, one of the key one of the key statements is: Scotland welcomes refugees, right? Another statement here in Glasgow is: people make Glasgow. And we know that Glasgow is made of very many migrant communities. But those statements do not mean anything when you try to get into a system that says, hang on a minute, we don’t know who you are, we don’t understand you, and it pushes back.

And so the law can do good, and it perhaps has done good in some areas. But I think in the design of it, we need to rethink that to make it do the good that it should.

It should protect, it should look after, should engage and consider the way in which people experience it, particularly those that are most excluded and marginalised.

But I don’t think it does that enough. or even at all in certain cases.

Jen Ang

Some guests spoke about the law as a tool for change – acknowledging for example that the law establishes a basic framework of rights against unfair treatment, which people do benefit from.

Satwat Rehmat, Chief Executive Officer of One Parent Families Scotland, reflects.

Satwat Rehman

I really do believe that laws empower us ,and can empower us and can offer us those protections against unfair treatment and securing rights to housing, benefits, support services, do you know. And that absolutely, I think without them, we’d be in a much, much worse position than we are now.

Jen Ang

Amanda Amaeshi, an activist with the Young Women’s Movement and former law student at the University College of London, agrees…

Amanda Amaeshi

In regards to being a tool like, obviously, people can, like, you go to court and have a case, and especially with cases of like strategic litigation where like it can use like individual cases can be leveraged to kind of advocate for wider, like wider legal precedents that can address broader systemic issues.

And there’s also like legal protections embedded in like anti-discrimination legislation, like the Equality Act, for example, which, equality is in the name. So I suppose, like, in that sense, it’s definitely a tool…

Jen Ang

Although, Pinar Aksu, points out that there can be challenges in using the law to challenge the law.

Pinar Aksu

Obviously, there are lawyers out there who uses the law to protect people and who uses the law to find different ways to uphold their human rights and find different mechanisms as well.

And I think it’s a difficult one, because they are challenging the law itself as lawyers, but then it’s the law that’s the problem.

Jen Ang

And Tressa Burke, Chief Executive Officer of Glasgow Disability Alliance, points out that strategic challenges even when successful do not have the strategic impact hoped for because the public authority that has been challenged will settle to avoid a strategic win that could positively affect many more people.

Tressa Burke

What we find, for example, what I mean by that is if you look at situations of social care where somebody maybe threatens judicial review, the next thing the case is settled.

And so we don’t have case law established. And it’s to you know on a case-by-case basis, that seems to be how local authorities resolve things, where they think they might lose.

So where it could be a tool, I mean, it is a tool for that person. The threat of it is helping that individual, but it’s not changing the systemic inequalities or barriers that people are facing, so I think it’s both.

Jen Ang

And Satwat Rehman points out that even where a legal challenge has been successful, there is also a risk in the wider political, social and economic context, that the legal victory is unenforceable.

She describes here an example of a right that might have been “won” in law, or in court but that fails to achieve real world change for the families that need it.

Satwat Rehman

But we always are pushed back to the fact that what we can do is constrained by the system and the finances within the system.

I mean, you know, if we want to look at a really fundamental right, every child has a right to an education, right? Every local authority has a duty to fulfil that right to that education. But what we do is do it in a way which will suit what we think is the majority. You know, so it may work for 70% of children and young people, but there are 30% whose rights are often compromised. And when you speak about why that is, you’re told it’s because of resource constraints.

You know, so if you’ve got a child with additional needs, if you’ve got a child who might require more one-to-one support to settle in class. Those rights aren’t realised in terms of their access to education being equal, because the resources aren’t there, you know. And they’re incredibly difficult things to challenge as an individual, as a parent, and that’s where I think that there is a real role for the law as a tool in terms of collective action and being able to look at an issue and say, okay, then do you know that parent there spoken about it? But actually, the evidence is showing us that this is a pattern, and then it’s the pattern that you need to be challenging in law.

The problem then becomes, you could win that, but how do you implement, do you know, your victory? Where are those resources going to come from? You know, are those who’ve got the duty to provide and to realise that right, going to be able to do so?

And so, you know, I mean, let me just give you an example of something that’s coming up more and more, which impacts on single parent families. Will impact on lots of families, but obviously we’re hearing about it from single parent families.

Where, due to the fact that resources are so limited in so many schools, if they’ve got children who’ve got additional needs, or who may be, you know, playing out the impact of early life trauma, or any of those things, parents will tell us about the fact that sometimes they haven’t even got as far as walking back home and through the door before the school will phone to say: “we don’t have the staff and we don’t have the resource. It’s not safe. Can you come and pick your child up?”

What parent is going to say no? You know, and we’ve been hearing about this beginning to happen more and more to the families that we’re working with. And so there’s a fundamental there about that child’s not receiving an education, right?

But then if you look at the welfare system and the fact that we’ve got a welfare system which has conditionality built into it, and you’re sanctioned if you can’t then meet those conditions, these are parents who are also being expected to be looking full time for work, enter work and increase their hours in work. And all of those areas have conditionality, which, if they don’t meet, they would be sanctioned.

Jen Ang

Many of our guests focused on barriers to accessing justice for individuals and communities – pointing out that not only is the court system (and access to courts) an issue, but that huge unmet legal need and the difficulty that people experience in accessing legal advice, information and lawyers is for many people – the insurmountable barrier to securing rights supposedly provided under law.

Amanda Amaeshi shares her experience of volunteering a free legal advice clinic during her time as a law student at University College London

Amanda Amaeshi

In regards to like, the practical barriers. So I thought about this through like, I’ve volunteered over the past year at UCL Integrated Legal Advice Clinic. So it’s located in East London, in Stratford, and the clinic offers like legal aid and also pro bono support in regards to housing, welfare, benefits, community care and education.

And so I had the opportunity to volunteer there, both as an admin volunteer and also through one of my final year modules, which is called access to justice and community engagement. So I got to help out a bit with helping the lawyers with their casework. So I guess, thinking about bad experience and it really illuminated for me the practical barriers that come with accessing law. First off, to do the cost. Well, the fact that so many people are having to access legal clinics, like UCL ILAC, it shows that just accessing legal support is really prohibitive, like, if private legal services are charging exorbitant fees, and it just becomes really inaccessible.

And then even where, obviously, legal aid does exist and the aim of that is supposed to be to provide access for those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it, legal aid is being slashed. There’s been lots of cuts, and it’s kind of had, it’s had a major impact on the sustainability of the legal aid sector.

And as a result, I’ve seen that the relatively few services offering like free legal assistance, especially when it comes to like ongoing support or representation beyond initial advice. And the limited numbers of clinics that do exist, like UCL’s ILAC are often inundated with inquiries, and they have no option that to signpost clients elsewhere.

And especially when I was working on telephones, answering client inquiries, I found myself having to do this a lot, having to, do some research, find other places that the inquirers could go to. But it also becomes a kind of inescapable loop, because I remember quite a lot of the times, I would say,: “oh, maybe you can go here. You can go here.” And then the inquirer would be like, “Oh, I’ve already been there, and they already didn’t have capacity. And in fact, they were the ones that told me to come to you.” So it just, it almost becomes a bit hopeless. You’re kind of just going round and round in circles.

And I suppose, going off of that, if you are lucky enough to secure that kind of full time, if you are lucky enough to get that support, there’s then, like so much bureaucracy and like opaqueness within the legal system, and statutes, regulations, guidance, that it’s often difficult to find and even more difficult to understand, and lots of technical language.

And I remember, as I was helping out with the casework, having to come up with legal arguments, and I’d spend ages reading these documents, and even for me as a law student, and even talking to other lawyers as well, it wouldn’t always be so straightforward to figure out what does this mean?

So if it’s already difficult for those of us who some experience already with law, then how much more difficult would it be for those who are in a legal crisis and then in a heightened state of vulnerability, and perhaps with other compounding inequalities on top, they do have, like, race or disability or age… how are they supposed to navigate the system? And sometimes, and maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but it also sometimes seems that this opaqueness and difficulty to navigate the system is not just a flaw, but kind of like, like a purposeful design.

Jen Ang

Having highlighted the idea that the difficulty of navigating legal and bureaucratic systems might be a purposeful design, Amanda goes on to give an example of what she means, and to question the justice of a system that is so difficult for ordinary people to navigate.

Amanda Amaeshi

I remember there was a client we had once needed to challenge a decision regarding the Department for Work and Pensions and the deadline for submitting the application to challenge the case, challenge the decision had technically passed.

But the lawyer who was supervising me said that, like, oh, appeal could probably still be made because of exceptional circumstances, in this case, to do with, like recent house moves and disability-related difficulties.

And then it raised the question for me of, like, who gets the benefit of this procedural flexibility. And the fact that late appeals could be accepted suggests, it kind of suggested to me that deadlines could function more as like deterrents, as opposed to like absolute cut off, which could potentially discourage claimants to assume that they have no further options after they’ve gotten this decision.

And if there is this flexibility as regards, like, the extenuating circumstances, why isn’t this more explicitly communicated? Why is this something that claimants actually have to fight for? And in this case, we’re fighting for with the support of legal professionals – so it’d be even worse if the claimant was trying to do it by themselves. And it almost seemed that a system is designed in a way that, if there are fewer challenges and it becomes, like a more manageable caseload.

But that’s not how justice is supposed to work, is it?

Jen Ang

Guests highlight other barriers in the legal system as including the time, money and emotional capacity involved in pursuing legal justice:

Tressa Burke explains why, in her experience, many disabled people do not pursue legal cases even where they have a clear right to do so:

Tressa Burke

People can’t afford to access legal justice.

They can’t afford, not just in financial terms, and I would argue that is the biggest barrier, but actually in terms of capacity, emotional energy, you know being disabled and relying on services – it is a battle. Your life is a battle, and people don’t always have the energy and for what’s required.

Jen Ang

Heather Fisken, Chief Executive Officer of Inclusion Scotland, a disabled person’s organisation, agrees, saying of the law:

Heather Fisken

It shouldn’t be a barrier. and it should be a tool. It should be something that we can use and we readily use it. But it’s not easy to do that. There’s all kinds of reasons why disabled people don’t use the law.

As individuals, disabled people and their families are up against a huge weight of officials involved in their lives.

Which piece of discrimination do you activate here? Which piece of discrimination are you challenging here?

Because from when you wake up in the morning until when you go to bed – and everything you do in between – whether that’s employment, learning, being a family member, trying to access services, socialise, use transport, use general services like shops, etc – there’s discrimination in all of that.

Which bit do you challenge? It’s exhausting.

Because I had one ex-colleague and I remember her telling me that she had something like 24 different professionals involved in her life. She had a filing cabinet in her hall for all of these different types of professionals involved in her life.

And then we’ve got people being refused health care, and people who don’t have their social key care needs met. You have people who… young people who have an educational needs assessment – assuming you can get that in the first place – and the needs aren’t being provided for.

Which one are we going for here? And then, of course, where do you find the lawyer? Where do you find the lawyer who can, and understands, and has the competence and the willingness, to take on your case?

Where do you find the legal aid to do it if you’re not on the passport benefits for it? Where you find the capacity and the time and the energy?

And one of the other things, perhaps the biggest thing really, a or one of them, is the fear, the fear of losing social care support if you try to challenge that.

I remember going to an event in a town up north, and we were being told by the parent of a disabled child about how their child had been excluded from the school trip because there was no wheelchair accessible bus.

So they stayed at home, or they stayed at school in the library, while everybody else went for a fun day out. And the mother tried to complain about this. But the problem was that in such a small rural place – and I think it’s important to remember what it can be like living in a rural place – the headmistress lived on the same street.

And she didn’t feel she could take serious action, whether that be legal or complaints processes, knowing that this person was her neighbour.

Jen Ang

Satwat Rehman talks about the long time frames it can take to resolve issues using a legal route – such as judicial review which is a challenge to a decision made by a statutory authority – as a major deterrent for people pursuing a legal remedy.

Here Satwat talks about trying to find a family to participate in a judicial review being brought by a charity called the Child Poverty Action Group, or CPAG.

Satwat Rehman

That’s right. I mean, I remember speaking to a group of firm parents, because CPAG were looking for parents who might consider, you know, taking part in things that they were wanting to do as part of judicial reviews.

But you have to commit to be around for a long time for that, you know. And the family said they were just not in a position to say, actually, yeah, I can be on this journey with you for two years.

Jen Ang

And Heather goes on to caution that lawyers themselves – who people approach to help them bring legal challenges – can themselves create insurmountable barriers to accessing the legal system.

Heather Fisken

I do remember somebody years ago, to be fair, who pulled out of working with a lawyer because the lawyer said, it takes me an extra hour to speak to you because of your impairments. Therefore, I’m going to charge you double.

And I was thinking, that’s a reasonable adjustment. Shouldn’t you as a lawyer understand the concept of reasonable adjustment in the Equality Act?

Jen Ang

During today’s podcast, we’ve heard guests discuss the law as a barrier or a tool to achieve equality for marginalised and excluded groups.

We have had reflections that look at this question in social and political context, and have also noted that changes in the law can promote equality and provide protection for some groups, but also that laws designed without excluded groups in mind can just amplify discrimination and exclusion.

We’ve seen some discussion, as well, on barriers in accessing justice due to the complexity of legal procedures, the costs of legal advice, the inaccessibility of lawyers and the legal system and also the exhaustion that is a real life part of life for people who are marginalised and excluded.

We’re ending today with a final reflection from Sandy Brindley, CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland and a part-time PhD student at the University of Glasgow School of Law. Sandy explains why she still believes the legal reform is important but for the impact on the lives of people in the justice system, and also as an educative tool for change in wider society.

Sandy Brindley

I think it is both. I mean, I think as a feminist engaging with the concept of law reform, I think we need to be aware that there are, I think, really powerful arguments, particularly from black feminists, about the intrinsically hostile nature of the justice process and potentially intrinsically racist.

There are limits, I think, when you be realistic to how much we can improve a system that really wasn’t set up to achieve justice for women who’ve experienced such an intimate violation.

But I don’t think that means that we can try, and I feel like as long as women are still seeking justice from the criminal justice system, to me, we have an onus to improve that system to minimise the harm it causes.

So I’ve been doing interviews for the PhD. I’m doing a part-time PhD at the University of Glasgow. I’ve been interviewing women – they’re called complainers in Scotland, survivors going through the justice process around sexual crimes. I’ve interviewed 24 complainers, and part of what I’ve been exploring is: what does justice mean to you?

Because I think that’s a question we don’t ask often enough, for women who have been raped: what would justice look like? What would it feel like to get justice for what you’ve been through?

And overwhelmingly, what women have said to me is that justice means safety.

And I think it is hard to see any way for women who have been raped to feel safe without engaging with the criminal justice system. Like that that prison does actually have – as much as there are many flaws to the system – prison does have an important role, and that it enables women to feel safe for at least a period of time while their rapist is in jail.

There was one woman that I interviewed who was just terrified because her rapist was up for parole and she was saying, “I know he’s going to kill me, when he gets out.”

So I think it’s important to bear that in mind about as much as there are limits and criticisms of feminist engagement with law reform, these are really urgent issues for women who’ve experienced rape or sexual crime.

So I think law reform is important. I think the law can play a really important role. I think it can also play an important educative role. So we reformed our approach to look at the definition of rape and gave a definition of consent for the first time back in, I think, was it 2009, the Sexual Offences Act.

But anyway, we set out a definition of rape, which included male rape for the first time, which I think was important. We also defined consent as “free agreement,” and it set out a list of circumstances where can consent is presumed to be absent.

And I think that is so important as an educative tool, particularly for speaking with young people.

I think one thing that the government should have done and didn’t when they introduced the Sexual Offences Act that redefined rape and defined consent was I think there really should have been and a proper public education campaign and community engagement, particularly with young people, to say: this is what the law is.

Because you can have really great law on the books, but if people don’t know, for example, that having “sex” (and I’m putting sex in quotation marks) with a woman who’s sleeping is rape, then the law really is failing its function. So I think as an educative tool, it can be really important.

We had another example that recently where there was a judgment, an appeal judgment came out that confirmed that you can’t consent to non-fatal strangulation. We’re seeing this a lot.

In rape cases, like forensic nurses are reporting to us, I’ve really seen quite a lot of this in rape exams, like forensic rape exams. Defence lawyers – I was speaking to an advocate, in a case the other week, who was saying they’ve just seen this so much in cases where they’re defending young men – like so many of these cases, sexual offence cases involving non-fatal strangulation.

To me, it’s clearly coming from what young men are seeing online, and particularly the impact of pornography and depictions of sex, that portray, for example, women enjoying this or this being a normal part of sex.

So I think it’s so important that young people are equipped with knowledge about the law, both for young men, so they don’t end up carrying out this behaviour thinking it’s normal and then they end up before the courts.

But also for young women, I think it’s really important because young women are under so much pressure to perform in a particular way in relation to femininity, and in relation to heterosexuality, that I think it can be hard for young women to really connect with what feels pleasurable to them and what feels okay to them.

And that’s not just societal pressure and fed by the narrative of pornography.

So I think that is really important that we can speak to young people and say, this is actually what the law says.

And I think we shouldn’t forget the power of that while we also look at other ways of trying to change societal attitudes. The law has a really important role there.

Jen Ang

And that was Sandy Brindley, concluding today’s podcast by reminding us that the different ways the law can be a tool for change – where, for example, it works to keep us safe from people who do harm, and where it is an educative tool for setting, or even changing, social norms.

Lots more big ideas today, from our guests, and I’d love to hear what you, our listeners, make of it all: for you, is the law a barrier or a tool to greater equality, or perhaps, both?

Meanwhile, heartfelt thanks to Talat Yaqoob, Pinar Aksu, Tim Hopkins, Pheona Matovu, Satwat Rehman, Amanda Amaeshi, Tressa Burke, Heather Fisken and Sandy Brindley, for their contributions to today’s episode.

And thanks so much to you, the listener for tuning into our Lawmanity podcast and our special series on Equality Under the Law in Scotland.

Our Equality Under the Law series has been generously support by a grant from the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, hosted by the London School of Economics. The Lawmanity podcast is co-produced by me, your host, Jen Ang, and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe. And the music you’ve been listening to is “Always on the Move” by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow-based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.

Thanks so much for tuning in today, we hope you enjoyed listening, and see you next time!

Transcript: Equal Under the Law: Does the law treat you equally? (Pt 1)

Jen — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 20:52:24 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Talat Yaqoob

“In one case that was described, it was because a young woman had decided to start wearing the hijab, that was reason enough for her to be considered potentially radicalised. Now that is the demonisation of our religion, that’s a demonisation of the expression of religion and religious belief, and so that is an example of where the implementation of so-called protection in law is implemented in way, and in my view also written in a way that demonises a particular community.”

Jen Ang

We also have a content warning for you: as mentioned, some of the activists we interviewed with work with women and girls survivors of violence and that means there are some references to sexual violence, including rape, in this episode.

Jen Ang

Today, we’re going to look the answers we got to our first question:

Do you feel the law works equally for you, or for your community? Why, or why not?

Across, the board, the answer for our guests was, “no – the law is not working equally for me, and my community,” and it was easy for them to express the reasons why…

Let’s start with this reflection from Pheona Matovu. Pheona founded the charity Radiant and Brighter in Glasgow to create opportunities for racialised migrant people and families to overcome barriers to successful and healthy living, in Glasgow.

She thinks the law treats racialised people unequally – and that is exactly what it is designed to do.

Pheona Matovu

I don’t think, at least at this point in time, I’m not quite sure that I would put equality in the same sentence with law. I think the law is there to do…something else other than equality.

It’s there to keep those it thinks are wrong, right. And perhaps those that are wrong and can pay more, do different.

So my work is with the adversely racialised communities, people who experience exclusion from systems, from processes, primarily.

But I also work, of course, with organisations looking at what policies they can put in place. And in my research, one of the areas, of course, that I do touch on is the human rights, which obviously come from the law against the law about discrimination against people on the basis of colour.

Now, when we think about where it started, where human rights started, we’ve come so far that it’s barely recognisable that it had anything to do with racism.

And so I think the law is… I don’t know, it just, it leaves you in a place where should we be doing something different? Should the law be rethought?

It feels like we keep adding layers to either dilute equality or increase power for those that hold power.

So I wouldn’t say works. I think it does what the system wants it to do, which is often around exclusion. I understand that it is important to have the law, of course, but I don’t think that it is it has been um designed equitably in order to achieve equity.

Jen Ang

Satwat Rehman, who has served as the Chief Executive Officer of One Parent Familes Scotland for 14 years, agrees – sharing from a related perspective why she, and the single parents she works with, feel the law is working exactly as it is intended to do so: by excluding and impoverishing single parents and their children.

Satwat Rehman

That is a really big question, and I’m going to answer it by starting off by saying that there is no one answer to it. It depends on so many factors, and I’ll speak about that from the perspective of the single parent families that we work with, but also I’ll speak about that as somebody who’s grown up in a racially minoritised community here in in the UK.

And for me, it’s also about a number of levels, because sometimes the issue isn’t with how lawyers are trying to test the law or to support people to realise their rights through the law. It’s the flaws that are built in by the lawmakers. And some of those aren’t flaws which are unintentional. Some of that might be exactly what they want the policy to do you know.

And for single parents, you see that a lot in the design of benefit support, for example, where we might take, you know, and lawyers have, through organisations like Child Poverty Action Group, taken cases to challenge things like the two-child limit, for example, or the benefit cap and other things which disproportionately impact on single parent families.

Jen Ang

So here, Satwat mentioned the benefit cap and the two-child limit. These were both reforms made to the welfare system by the UK Government which limits the amount of income a family can receive when they are receiving mainstream benefits. And these cases were taken by Child Poverty Action Group, which is a charity, in conjunction with other organisations in order to challenge the effect of the welfare reform limits for poor families across the UK.

Satwat Rehman

But those cases haven’t been successful because of the way the law was made and its intent. So I think there is something there about what role lawyers, who are activists and who believe in social justice, can play in the development of the laws, which is critical, I think, from this point of view. Because I think what quite often happens is after the bills are passed and they become acts, and they’re being enacted. It can be too late.

And so there is something about how you can be more active as a profession, in supporting campaigns and activism, which is completely and utterly grounded in the experiences of the individuals who are meant to be the benefactors of these laws, or actually being completely and utterly, and I’m not using this word lightly, but destroyed by the changes that are going to be taking place – as we can see at the moment when we looked at disabled people’s organisations and their response to the latest set of welfare reforms that the UK government is considering – which is all about reducing the benefit bill by forcing people with lifetime conditions to be considering how they go into work, even though work may never be sustainable or affordable for them in terms of lifting them out of poverty.

You know, there is so much evidence to show that the two-child limit keeps and pushes families into poverty. You know, so on the one hand, you’ve got a child poverty strategy being developed at UK level. On the other hand, you’ve got them sticking with and pushing through further reforms that’s going to increase poverty levels amongst families. So there I would ask, is there a hierarchy in terms of which laws are considered important?

Jen Ang

Picking up this theme of a disconnection between how the law is made, who the law serves, and who is impacted by inequalities in the law, Pinar Aksu, a migrant rights campaigner, theatre practitioner and PhD Student at the University of Glasgow sees this disconnection as intentional, and rooted in deep historical tradition designed to reinforce inequalities.

Pinar Aksu

So within my work, I work in the migration sector, especially people who are seeking asylum and refuge. I think witnessing the changes of the immigration law has been really interesting in the last few years, and also observing the pattern of the laws that was generated over the time.

The first immigration law we had in the UK was the 1905 Alien Act. And then when you compare that to the current immigration laws we have, and the language, when you look at the language of the way it’s been described within the legislations, but also within the title of the law as well. It makes you question: has anything changed since more than 100 years ago?

We still use similar, divisive languages within the law when we are talking about movement, and when we’re designing and defining what migration is. And I think that’s something that is very disappointing to see that nothing has really changed.

What’s been interesting for me is, since I’ve started my PhD, every single year there was a new law on immigration that has passed. So we had the Nationality and Borders Act, and then we had the Illegal Migration Act, and then we had the Rwanda Act, and now we have a new bill that’s being proposed in the parliament as well. So that’s been very crucial for me to witness it and see how the law itself is developed and to see who it benefits.

And obviously it sometimes benefits certain people, it doesn’t benefit other people who really need protection.

I also find it fascinating the way the performative side of the law as well, and that’s something I’ve been looking into within my research about how the laws are designed, how legislations are designed, how they are being proposed, and such as in House of Lords, House of Commons, and then you have this monarchy, and then you have this place where decisions are being made by a elite group of people who are, I think, truly disconnected from realities.

And the performative side element of it, of the fact that it’s just, yeah, group of people making decisions for 1000s and millions of people. And then that makes me question, is this what we want, and is this how the law should be drafted? What about people’s voices? Can we have a structure where we reimagine how the law should be, and how that should look like?

Jen Ang

Similarly, Talat Yaqoob, a political commentator, activist and co-chair of the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls, sees the law as intentionally unequal, but because it sits within a wider context of systemic inequality – and is just one of the ways in which that inequality is perpetuated.

Talat Yaqoob

So if I was to talk about it for myself and the vast majority of communities I work with, that would be, you know, the community of women of sisterhood, the community of colours that I work with. So whether it’s black, Asian, minority ethnic communities, disabled people’s communities that I work with, and then Muslim communities of which I am part and also work with… and it’s a resounding no.

With the intention, you would hope, the intention of the law – seeing everybody as equal – would be there. But the law in itself does not sit in a vacuum away from the realities of society, whether historic or or current, existing. The institutionalised, the systemic inequalities, are threaded into which laws are made, how they are made, and critically, how they’re implemented. And the mindsets, the thinking, the institutionalised inequalities, across the board within that, they will come to the fore in all of those spaces: wherever law is being written, developed, implemented.

So unless there is some real proactive work to rectify that. Then, actually, in the current society we exist within, can it ever treat everybody equally?

Jen Ang

In Talat’s view, this leads to a kind of double-speak, where laws designed to keep the public safe, in reality operate to create unsafe spaces, for some people, and the law becomes an instrument to exclude, harm and demonise minoritised groups.

Talat Yaqoob

The Counterterrorism and Security Act of, I think, 2015. So in law, in writing, that is about keeping the nation and the nation’s people safe. But actually it has created unsafe spaces, insecurity and concern for those of us who will appear Muslim, who are – particularly for black and brown men – for hijab or burqa wearing women and we see that largely through the way in which the Prevent strategy, which is obviously part of that Act, is implemented.

Jen Ang

Talat has referenced the Prevent strategy. The Prevent strategy is the UK Government’s flagship counterextremism policy. It aims to identify people at risk of committing terrorist acts and to intervene. But controversially, to achieve this aim, the Prevent duty requires public bodies including schools, nurseries, universities, social services and health care providers to monitor and report people they suspect are vulnerable to extremism. That brings teachers, doctors, social workers and others into the realm of people who have responsibility for doing this.

Talat Yaqoob

Now, human rights organisations have repeatedly called out and evidenced the racism and Islamophobia that is inherent in the way in which the Prevent strategy has been implemented, and how it is being used as a method to penalise rather than protect.

And in particular, what I often go to is a way in which the Prevent strategy has a obligation on those who work in public sector, public authority spaces – so within our NHS, within schools – to report what they determine as extremism, and the definition of terrorism within it is so wide, and if you think about systemic inequality and leaving it to the perceived objectivity of an individual to decide what is extremism, we have seen multiple reporting and referrals to Prevent which have been wholly inappropriate, unevidenced, a disproportionate number of children and young people.

In one case that was described, it was because a young woman had decided to start wearing the hijab. That was reason enough for her to be considered potentially radicalised. Now that is the demonisation of a religion. That’s a demonisation of the expression of religion and religious belief. And so that is an example of where the implementation of so-called protection in law is implemented in a way, and in my view, also written in a way that that demonises a particular community.

Jen Ang

Another way of looking at this question – does the law treat you and your community equally – is to look at equality under the letter of the law, or reform of the actual language and substance of the law in order to make it more equal.

This is an area where many of the activists I spoke to have first-hand experience of advocacy success – leading to, among other things, the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010.

Tim Hopkins, who is an LGBT activist and also former director of the Equality Network, describes his assessment of how equality under the law for LGBT+ people has progressed since the 1980s in Scotland, but also ponders the challenges that remain for defending the rights of trans and non-binary people – under those same laws – today.

Tim Hopkins

Then the other dimension is how the law works and you know, being able to uphold your rights and what’s involved in that. To answer the question, when I started campaigning, which was back in the 1980s, the whole environment was that the law treated us very unfairly as LGBT people.

And that’s really what got me involved, so it was all about changing the law.

Over the past 30 years, or a little more, 35 years, there have been big changes, big positive changes to the law as it affects LGBT people in Scotland and across the UK and other places as well. I made a list, and there’s about 10 really important things on the list.

And if I look back at the Equality Network’s first manifesto for the first Scottish Parliament election in 1999, almost everything on that manifesto has been done, and most of the things on the manifesto were about changing the law. And since then, we added some additional things that weren’t such high priorities, but a large number of them have been done.

So in terms of whether the law works for LGBT people: for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, the law is far better now than it was 30 years ago. For trans people, things are really quite different. There have been some improvements: the two key things are the gender recognition system that came in in 2004 and the anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws which are now in the Equality Act which date back to, originally, 1999.

But both those things have been seriously undermined this year, in particular, by the Supreme Court judgment back in April in For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers which is a huge problem for trans people. So for trans people, the law is definitely not working at the moment.

Jen Ang

Sandy Brindley, CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland, has also seen legislative change in seeking justice for survivors of sexual violence, and she reflects on how we may have come far, but we still have far to go.

Sandy Brindley

So I started in Rape Crisis as a volunteer, in I think it was 1994. it was only 30 years that I’ve been involved in Rape Crisis, and a lot of that work has been working around legal responses to sexual crime and trying to improve and legal responses to sexual crime.

And I still remember really vividly the first woman that I supported in court when she was given evidence in a rape trial. I think it must have been like maybe ‘96. And I was so shocked at how she was treated. I actually couldn’t believe it, and it wasn’t just the questions. It was just the demeanour of the defence lawyer was almost mocking and so demeaning towards her. And I thought here is a woman who – this is devastating for her. It is terrifying going to give evidence in court, and we’re treating her with such a lack of humanity. And that experience did have really quite a profound impact on me in terms of I suppose a lot of the work I’ve done since then which has been engaging with the justice process to try and make it a little bit less traumatic for people and particularly women who are seeking justice.

So all the time I’ve worked at Rape Crisis, that I have seen really, really significant changes. I think there is no doubt that the law in Scotland and in many jurisdictions fails women who are seeking justice after rape.

Undoubtedly, you just need to look at the statistics, how many cases never make it to court, and the low conviction rate of those that do. It is the lowest conviction rate of any crime type, rape has, in Scotland. But also just the stories that survivors tell us about how traumatic and violating experience it has been – particularly of court and of cross-examination.

So I think it’s fair to say my strategies have maybe changed over the years. I was like in my early twenties filled with anger, you’re not always that constructive, I think, in your approach – when you just really feel the injustice of it.

Whereas as time has progressed, I’ve realised that the way to make change really is relationships and finding common ground. And I think we have built some really positive relationships with the Faculty of Advocates, with the Crown Office, with the Court Service, and really trying to work together to make things better while still retaining enough of a critical edge to stand outside and criticise where it’s absolutely necessary.

So that’s a long way of saying no, I don’t think the law does treat particularly women equally if who have experienced sexual crime. I think it’s getting better but think there’s still a lot to do.

Jen Ang

In the last part of their reflections, both Tim Hopkins and Sandy Brindley pick up on another way in which activists assess whether or not the law is working equally, and that is, by looking to outcomes – as experienced by some of the communities the law is supposed to be serving equally.

The disability justice movement was also key behind the move to adopt the Equality Act 2010 and a range of other modern legislation designed to better protect and support disabled people to access their rights.

Tressa Burke, a disability rights activist with over 30 years of experience, and the Chief Executive Officer of the Glasgow Disability Alliance, expresses her frustration at the failures of the law on the books to lead to real, lasting change for disabled people.

Tressa Burke

So we have a raft of pieces of legislation. So my background is I’m a social worker to trade, so I’m not just talking about the you know the Human Rights, the Disability Discrimination Act, the Equality Act. I’m also talking about and the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, the Disabled Persons Act, the Direct Payments Act, the Self-Directed Support Act.

So there is a raft of legislation that tells disabled people that they should have rights across a whole range of areas. Some of them are about social care to enable independent living. Some of them are about education and employment and provision of goods and services.

I would confidently say that disabled people do not have those rights observed or realised across most of those areas. I don’t think there is any area where I could say that I think disabled people fully have the rights.

So, I mean, it’s a long answer, but I don’t think that the law is working for disabled people, for diverse disabled people who are not only people with conditions and impairments, but who are also black and minority ethnic or people of colour, they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, they are women, they are older people and younger people, so the law is not working for disabled people, but also very marginalised disabled people within that.

Jen Ang

Heather Fisken, Chief Executive Officer of Inclusion Scotland, Scotland’s leading disabled people’s organisation, agrees.

Heather Fisken

I think the short answer is no, unfortunately. It should. absolutely should. But no. And I think the evidence spells that out. We still have a massive employment gap.

Disabled people are not getting jobs they apply for. We still have discrimination in every walk of life. So the short answer is no, whether you’re looking at the statute, or whether you’re looking at the system, and the process.

Jen Ang

And finally, some of our guests turned from thinking about the law as it is made in Parliaments, or the failures of the law to achieve the aims of legislation, to the actual physical and emotional experience of people as they become subjects of the legal system – by being drawn into a legal process – or as they encounter the court system.

Let’s start with this recent example from Davie Donaldson, a leading Travellers rights activist. Davie describes in this longer excerpt his attempts to bridge the disconnect between a bureaucratic court system and a bewildered Traveller family who were pursued by a Scottish local council in an attempt to prevent them from settling on their ancestral lands.

Davie Donaldson

Well, mean, where do I begin, right? I mean, my work since I’ve been about 15 has been trying to disentangle and navigate paths that were never built for Gypsy Travellers, right?

Infrastructures that were always built for settled populations and settled people are inherently difficult for Gypsy Travellers to navigate for a number of reasons.

But when it comes to the legal system and the law, that task just becomes mammoth.

I think as well it’s important to recognise that for Gypsy Travellers, the law has always been weaponised in Scotland. um I mean, you can go right back to the early 1500s and see some of the first anti-Gypsy legislation being brought into play.

And from that point onwards, the law has always been seen by settled communities – particularly settled authorities who don’t want a Gypsy Traveller or nomadic people to exist at times – the law’s always been their tool in which to curtail that.

And so for Gypsy Travellers, it’s always been this David and Goliath battle since the very start of their, I guess, experience with our modern law system and its foundations.

For me, my experience has been trying to navigate that both as an individual, but also as an advocate for communities, right? And what that often means is trying to take wording from this really alien,.. alien educated environment to the layman, to the local kind of communities who perhaps have had very limited education, certainly not third, um you known, second and third levels of education, but also trying to think about, well, where is the law trying to confuse communities?

Because oftentimes when they bring me in, it’s: we’ve received this document and we don’t know what it means. Or we’ve received this citation and we have no idea what it means. I mean, only recently, give you an example, last week I was contacted by a family who were travelling.

It’s also important to notice that for Gypsy Travellers’ experience with the law and with the justice system, it tends to be at these, what could be called conflict points.

Regularly, those are experienced as Gypsy Travellers travelling. And because we don’t own the land in which we travel, oftentimes it leads to evictions. And evictions are kind of the key trigger point for our experience with the justice system.

So I was contacted by this family who were travelling. They stopped on a disused airfield. And they’d stopped at eight o’clock at night. They pulled onto this airfield.

And by three o’clock the next day, they’d received a Supreme Court of Session document, outlining that they were to be evicted with immediate enforcement.

And they had 24 hours to respond to this written enforcement letter, which was about 15 pages long. And that they had to respond in the form of answers to the Court of Session, which also meant that unless they were able to appoint a solicitor between three o’clock and five o’clock that day, and the solicitor was to be able to read over this document and be able to submit answers on their behalf, they were going to have to put the answers into the Court of Session by hand delivery.

Now, you can imagine the mammoth task that that would be for anyone, but particularly for this family, it’s important to notice that they’d just been evicted from an industrial estate. All of their ancestral camps in the area had been blocked off.

And so they had a number of young children. We had elderly people, a number of disabilities present on the camp as well. And so for this family, it was really important, perhaps more than others, to be able to be in a very safe location. A number of their children had quite severe autism, so they couldn’t stop at the side of the road because of the worry of traffic and the bairns needing space, right?

So they were beside themselves with worry. They had no idea what this meant. All they knew is that the letter threatened sheriff officer action where their vehicles would be town away, where their caravans would be removed from the site, and where police enforcement might happen. So they were terrified.

So they contacted me. They sent me photographs of the citation that that evening. I did my best to read through it from the kind of garbled photos. And then we together pulled together some answers.

And I then drove from the north of Scotland to Edinburgh and to hand deliver it to the Court of Session.

Now, when I got to the Court of Session, I was immediately faced with a security barrier.

I’d got there at one o’clock. I had to go up to the main office to speak to the reception and say, look, I need to go to the Court of Session and hand this document. And they said, well, I’m sorry, but the Court of Session’s on its lunch break. So you won’t be able to get down there until two o’clock.

I said, OK. And they said, but you can wait. So I sat down and I waited for the hour.

And in that time of waiting, and this is why I mentioned this, what might seem quite, and I guess, an insignificant part of the story, but waiting is something that is highly triggering for Gypsy Traveller communities.

Because waiting, particularly in a formal environment like a court or even just in an office building, it triggers all of those juvenile memories of being excluded at school, of being made to feel different, of dealing with the justice system in a way that’s inherently unjust.

And so even for me, I guess I’m used to dealing with professional folk and police and social services and so on. But nonetheless, waiting in that moment was highly triggering.

I felt my anxiety peaking.

I felt my heart rate going.

And at moments, I wanted to walk out, right? I wanted to leave that building.

I didn’t want to be there anymore in this really structured environment that was felt like the walls were closing in on every side.

Eventually I got through. We got through the barrier, went down to the office.

When I got there, I handed the document to the reception. They said, right, we need to check this. So then another period of waiting. So I then had to wait for another hour.

By that stage, and one of their office staff had had the document reviewed and checked by some seniors. They came back and they said, right, have you contacted the solicitor?

And I said, no, because I know the name of the solicitor, but it’s a big multinational kind of firm. But I don’t know the name of the individual solicitor who’s dealing with the case.

I wasn’t given any contact details because interlocuter that we’d been given missed out a lot of the appendices. So we weren’t given all the information that the Court of Session had been given.

We weren’t given contact details for the solicitor’s firm. Instead, we were just given the formal address of the Court of Session.

So the admin said, “well, you have to speak to the solicitor. We can’t accept these as answers because they’re not in appropriate format.”

I said, “Right, okay. But what is the appropriate format?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I said, “Right.”

He said, “You know, you can have these in online.”

I said, “I can’t because I’m not a solicitor.”

He said, “Ah, okay. In what capacity are you acting with the occupiers?”

Now, I knew before going there that I couldn’t do anything that would imply I was a solicitor because then I’d be breaking the law.

So I was very, very careful, but then I also wanted to ensure that it was clear that the document had been written with the occupiers and therefore that these families, you know, they weren’t having something placed on them, but they’d actually written this document alongside me, albeit with some support around, you know, their rights and legislation and so on.

And I said, “Well, I’m an advocate, so I’m just wanting to help the families get their voices heard.”

“Ah, but you have to be acting in some capacity. What capacity?”

And I said, I knew I couldn’t admit that I had no idea what he was asking. But at the same time I was terrified to do anything which might get me in in hot water. So I think he eventually realised this and he said, “look, I would go to the and solicitor’s office.”

So I left there. I drove to the headquarters of the solicitors, went in.

Of course, I had no idea what solicitor I was asking for. I had no case reference or anything like that. I just had this legal document.

And I just handed it to someone and I said, look, I said, I really hope this counts as within the 24-hour period because otherwise these families are facing eviction to nowhere. There’s nowhere for them to go.

Eventually, I got an email back from the solicitors and they said they would consider the position, because there was clear evidence that there would be a breach of public sector equality duties. There was clear evidence of there was no EQIA – no Equalities and Human Rights Impact Assessment – had been carried out. It was impossible for it to have been carried out in that time period anyway.

So there were significant concerns because it was a public authority who was doing the enforcement.

So I then went back that night, drove up to the north-east of Scotland, went to visit the families, showed them, told them what had happened, gave them a hand copy of the letter, and so on, for their records.

And when I was speaking to them, they said, “I don’t know what all the problem’s about. There’s no mess. There’s no antisocial behaviour. There’s been no complaints. All we want is somewhere safe for our kids to stay.”

And I think that one example shows you just the David and Goliath task that often exists for families.

Jen Ang

Davie described earlier his own anxiety whilst waiting in the Court of Session to be seen, rooted in his own experiences with places of formal authority – and he goes on to describe the impact for the families he works with of encounters like these with the legal justice system.

Davie Donaldson

Many of the families that I work with have low rates of literacy. They have an absolute fear of the justice system.

So if they’re ever given anything formal, their minds immediately go to: “What will happen to my children? Will social services get involved? Will my children be removed? What will happen to me? Will I end up in prison?”

You know, there’s such a lack of information around the rights of Gypsy Travellers within the community. But there’s also this predetermination of, well, they’re going to find it wrong against me anyway.

So what’s the point? You know, so it’s a difficult situation.

Jen Ang

And finally, I’d like to return to Pheona Matovu, whose opening reflections we listened to at the start of the podcast.

She asks us whether the law – as we know it, and define it – is even the right place to start as a way for humanity to deal with the deep, disturbing and difficult problems we bring to our courts – and her questions gently urge us to consider whether the law can ever treat us equally, and whether, as a tool, it can be wielded with humanity.

Pheona Matovu

So I have worked over a period of 17 years with people who seek refuge and who seek asylum. And one of the elements around asylum seeking, of course, we know that the [Refugee] Convention expects that people should be protected if they’re seeking asylum. However, what we know is that when people are seeking asylum, they are expected to go to court to present their case because the law stipulates that they have to present a case.

But when you think about people are presenting the case, they are already operating from a position of being disempowered just by putting them in a position where they have to express themselves by law rather than express themselves by the experiences that they have.

What does that do to society? What does that teach us that asylum seekers or people who are seeking asylum – don’t even like the language asylum seekers, but people who are seeking asylum – it says to us that they should be dealt with by the law.

When in fact, we should be dealing with them on the basis of humanity and dignity. And so if you even begin to question that, then people, of course, will respond with the law: This is what the law stipulates. This is what you should do.

But is that what we want for humanity? So in that regard, that’s just one example. I could spend a whole day giving you examples here, you know that.

But for me, that is painful. It’s critical that we rethink why would you put somebody who is going to tell their story of perhaps by having been raped, having been beaten, having been damaged by war, to actually go into courts to express themselves and be judged by law.

How can you judge a situation so dire, with the law?

Jen Ang

And that concludes today’s episode, in which a number of prominent Scottish activists sat down to talk to us about our first big question: does the law treat you, and your community, equally?

Across the board, our guests said: ‘no’ the law does not treat us equally – and they told us exactly why they thought that.

Some people asked whether it makes sense to speak about the law as separate from political, economic and cultural forces. For them, the legal system is a reflection of systemic inequality, which is either intentional or due to an oversight, a failure to think about equity in designing the law and a failure to include or involve and communities in the designing who would be most adversely impacted by it.

That was never a requirement to be met in developing the law, and by and large and it still isn’t – although there are strong moral and principled arguments, and some legal arguments, in favour of doing so.

What does it mean, some of the guests ask, that we allow there is such a wide gulf between those who make the law, and those who experience its impacts – and so few ways of bridging that divide?

Some of our participants reflected that they had seen progress towards equality under the law, but others – looking to outcomes – pointed out that whilst we may have seen progressive modernisation of our legislation (the laws passed by Parliaments) we are not seeing real change on the ground for excluded and discriminated against groups, including disabled communities, racialised communities, nomadic peoples, and, of course, trans and non-binary people.

We heard a few different perspectives on how triggering and traumatic interactions with the formal court systems can feel, and ended the episode with a poignant question – whether the law can ever treat us equally, and can it, as a tool, ever be wielded with humanity?

Big questions, and I’d love to hear what you, our listeners, make of it all.
Meanwhile, a very big thank you to Pheona Matovu, Satwat Rehman, Pinar Aksu, Talat Yaqoob, Tim Hopkins, Sandy Brindley, Tressa Burke, Heather Fisken and Davie Donaldson for their contributions to today’s episode.

And thanks so much to you, the listener for tuning into our Lawmanity podcast and our special series on Equality Under the Law in Scotland.

Our Equality Under the Law series has been generously support by a grant from the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, hosted by the London School of Economics. The Lawmanity podcast is co-produced by me, your host, Jen Ang, and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe. And the music you’ve been listening to is “Always on the Move” by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow-based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.

Thanks so much for tuning in today, we hope you enjoyed listening, and see you next time!

Transcript: The Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal Case, with Maria McCloskey

Jen — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 07:17:15 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Maria McCloskey

“Having the council admit in open court that they’ve breached a legal requirement, you know, I think it it’s huge…

“the importance of holding governments and, um you know, public authorities to account using the law, … I always think it shouldn’t have to be up to small community organisations to make sure that public authorities are doing what they should do. But that’s the world in which we live.”

Jen Ang

Hello and welcome to the Lawmanity podcast, where we explore the complex relationship between law and activism and discuss the different ways that law can oppress people but can also lead to real social change.

I’m Jen Ang, a human rights lawyer and activist based in Scotland and your host on the Lawmanity podcast.

This week, we’re speaking to human rights lawyer, activist and legend, Maria McCloskey how she and the Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal campaign (Or SWOT Campaign) brought a legal challenge that halted plans to develop a major fossil fuel terminal being developed directly offshore a beautiful, and sleepy seaside town (in Mid and East Antrim)near Belfast, in Northern Ireland.

Maria is an experienced human rights solicitor who holds a master’s degree in human rights law from Queen’s University, Belfast, and has substantial experience both in private practice as well as at the Children’s Law Centre in Belfast, where she represented unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

She then headed Public Interest Litigation Support as Director Solicitor from 2022 to 2024, where she was the instructing solicitor in the Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal or SWOT campaign case that we will be discussing today.

This year, she’s taken her work global by stepping into her new role as Executive Director of Irish Rule of Law International. Irish Rule of Law International is an all-island non-profit that promotes and supports the development of rule of law systems across the world.

The organization does this with the support of judges, lawyers and other justice sector experts from both jurisdictions in Ireland who provide their time, skills and expertise on a pro bono basis to support the mission.

So welcome Maria to the podcast. I’m so excited to have you here.

04:08.01

Maria McCloskey

Thank you, Jen. It’s lovely to see you and it’s I’m delighted to have been invited on. So I look forward to our discussion.

04:16.10

Jen Ang

Brilliant. So do I. Now, I like to start this podcast with kind of a surprise opener question to get us settled and just to learn a bit more about the people behind the legends we’re interviewing. A good friend of mine pointed out to me that our sense of smell is one of our oldest senses and that we can actually hold deep connections between the sense of smell and our memories.

So if you don’t mind, please can you tell me about a smell that’s meaningful to you, maybe something you really like or something that’s connected to a place or time that you’d like to bring to mind?

04:47.25

Maria McCloskey

Yeah, I love that question. It’s definitely unique one. So I think a sense of smell that always brings back a lot of memories and sort of evokes certain emotions is the smell of freshly cut grass. and So I am a country girl. I grew up and ah outside a small village in County Derry. My dad’s a farmer.

And i think that the smell of fresh cut grass kind of brings me back to my childhood. It’s one of those smells that makes me feel good inside. I don’t know why, but i think there are others who would say that they love that smell as well. It sort of reminds me of um just the sort of the start of spring or we’re getting into spring. And when I was at school, it was also a sign that the summer holidays were coming or weren’t too far away. So it evokes a lot of positive emotions in me. And I think that given the topic that we’re discussing today and climate justice in general, I think it fits very well with with that whole theme.

05:52.33

Jen Ang

Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. And actually, when you describe that, I can almost picture um yeah spring around the corner, sort of younger you um in a quieter and maybe um maybe simpler time. um But i I think you’re right. A lot of people have spoken about and smells from nature and also um something that conjures to mind a counterbalance to maybe the the busy kind of um workaday world that ah that human rights lawyers and activists often sit in. So thank you for sharing that. And I will now turn to Today’s main topic, which is about helping listeners understand how you and colleagues used the law to achieve significant change um in your successful legal challenge in the Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal case.

06:40.23

Jen Ang

So I wanted to start by um understanding better your work with the campaign, and then we’ll move on to maybe your reflections about um what you accomplished and what still needs to be done. And just about one year on now, as I understand it from that legal challenge.

So to start with, um can you explain to us how you got involved with the campaign, um what it was about and what was at stake that made you think that legal action was going to be the answer?

07:07.30

Maria McCloskey

Okay, so as you have mentioned just in your opening about my background at at the time, I was working with a small NGO in Belfast called Public Interest Litigation Support.

07:18.81

Maria McCloskey

um And I suppose from um ah very, very small organization, I’m trying to address and support cases which are in the public interest across the broad spectrum of human rights and equality issues there had been for you know the the few years that the organization was in existence of a certain focus on the big the big issues in Northern Ireland and that residents and and citizens and people living in Northern Ireland have faced in the last decade or so and they were largely probably

06:52.24

Maria McCloskey

um around issues like the the Troubles cases coming out of the Troubles and issues affected by our troubled past so things like housing, education, social welfare those issues and so those cases those cases tended to be the cases that we were providing our support where we could but we are you know PILS is an organisation which supports that broad range of human rights and equality issues and I think there had been a growing appreciation even before I joined the organisation, but certainly when I joined and when we started to work more closely with some of our members, that um environmental and climate justice is is key to and the future.

07:15 .00

Maria McCloskey

I mean, if we don’t have, if we don’t protect the planet, which we have, and we don’t protect the resources and um the environment that we all share, we won’t have issues like housing and and those sorts of things that that that require our attention. So I think that it’s one of the areas of law that people appreciate more and more connects with so many other areas of law.

09:51.60

Maria McCloskey

And so when then an organisation did come to us and say, we would like your, you know, your support, we have a potential legal challenge and we don’t have a solicitor. it was a great outcome of the work that we had done to try and attract this.

10:07.15

Maria McCloskey

But it was really asking us then to step into that space and and provide the solicitor representation, because this particular organisation, Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal, didn’t have the resources, didn’t have a solicitor on board.

10:20.38

Maria McCloskey

but were very much up against the clock in terms of the challenge that they wanted to take. And so a little bit of a you know a scary moment, I suppose, for me as the only solicitor in the organisation to say, yes, we will represent you.

Jen Ang

So let’s take a moment to discuss who the Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal campaign are, and what they were challenging when they approached Maria and the PILS Project for help.

Here’s some recent news coverage from ITV News

Daniel Duffy, ITV News

Whitehead is a sleepy seaside town in County xx but it may not be sleepy for long as a new oil terminal development has been proposed .. and campaigners are concerned about the impact it may have on the town.

Clodagh Miskelly

We’re talking about huge impacts in terms of climate change, huge emissions from this …85,5 million tonnes of carbon.

Daniel Duffy

At the weekend, Whitehead is full of tourists, with many campervans pitching up in the area to take in the sea views, and enjoy water sports like swimming and sailnig. Some residents say that the development could put an end to all that.

Dorothy Whittingston

We are a town that is based in the tourist economy. And I worry very much that this development will have an impact on that. That we could turn into one of the typical small towns , with the closed shops, with the deteriorating centre, with the lack of activities for its residents and others to participate in.

Jen Ang

So at the time the SWOT campaigners came to PILS for help, they were looking for a way to legally challenge the council’s decision to approve a planning application for the development of this oil terminal.

Maria goes on to list some of the many challenges the legal team and the campaign faced in getting their case off the ground.

15:31.16

Maria McCloskey

another challenge I suppose being in this space is that you know often you’re talking about small teams of and I’m speaking personally here, relatively inexperienced um ah you know lawyers and and that’s just, it was a challenge I think probably for me personally, but also appreciating this is what we’re here to do. We’re here to provide the support.

16:10.60

Maria McCloskey

I’ve got the skills, the knowledge, the qualification of being a lawyer. I might not know this area of law in and out, but with the help of the likes of the pro bono lawyers, with the team at PILS who worked night and day at times to get this ready.

16:25.96

Maria McCloskey

that it is a challenge that can be overcome provided again you’re realistic about it and um the great thing about being in in this space in the human rights space is there’s very much a well we’ll all pull together and we’ll make it happen

19:40.68

Maria McCloskey

The local residents, the people involved in the campaign the organisation itself, they had been working for a number of years.

19:51.57

Maria McCloskey

I mean, ever since this proposal was sort of, um or the the planning application was submitted, they were trying and succeeding, in my view, in getting together and and making those freedom of information requests and looking at the relevant laws or what might be relevant, to looking at what the…

20:09.54

Maria McCloskey

the the company had submitted and all of those things to there was a little a huge amount of work went on before we became involved and Geraint and Clodagh who we worked with very closely at PILS, I just want to commend them on their commitment and I think that it came at the expense of you know their own personal time, this these are volunteers as they often are with you know local community campaigns, people who have full-time jobs and and other commitments who are doing this kind of thing in the evening and at the weekends

20:43.77

Maria McCloskey

you know to to no personal benefit or gain really it’s about the community in which they live and wanting to protect that environment so I mean I’m still in such to admiration of of them their their commitment to this cause um uh so yeah a huge amount of work went on in the background and before we moved. The importance of community in holding their elected representatives and officials to account, and I think it was very, very clear in this case.

15:12.46

Maria McCloskey

and it took a small organisation, a campaign group, a grassroots campaign group together with, um you know, myself, Emma, Kate, Hilary at PILS. Together we hadn’t done this before. um And um that we then engaged pro bono lawyers, Acland Bryant and Mark Willers, KC.

29:55.58

Maria McCloskey

And you know I remember Mark and Acland coming over and us going out with Geraint and looking at the you know looking at the and area. we drove out we said this is where they’re planning about this and you know we we got a real sense of what we were talking about and again I think that that’s hugely important in these types of and legal challenges and campaigns is that you know we were all kind of invested in it you know we were invested in it anyway on behalf of the group and what they’re trying to achieve but then you go out and you see it and you see the beautiful landscape and you see some of the nature that exists there and then it makes you realise why why you’re doing what you’re doing

30:36.27

Maria McCloskey

So, you know, I just think that at the outset and I’m looking in, I maybe would have been afraid to say, yes, we can do this because I’d never done it before. But are you ever going to learn how to do it unless you do it you know, so it’s all those things that feel the fear and do it anyway.

Jen Ang

I went on, in our interview, to ask Maria – what challenges did she face, as a lawyer, in bringing a strategic legal challenge alongside the work of a long-running environmental justice campaign?

11:55.33

Maria

Yeah, so from that perspective, I suppose, it’s always the being clear on what a legal challenge can do. So, you know, obviously, many of these types of organisations like Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal, they’re very much focused on, it says it in their name, they want to stop the redevelopment of this oil terminal.

13:02.78

Maria McCloskey

And i suppose the challenge the challenge within that is… being realistic about what you can do and what is going to come out of this at the end. and So, you know, the the challenge that we brought, which was successful, did not mean the end of that campaign and it has not meant the end of what Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal are trying to do, because what it did, it was stopped a particular process from happening.

13:30.22

Maria McCloskey

But that process can now be restarted. And, you know, these plans to redevelop the oil terminal you know are in the process of being brought forward again addressing the challenge that we brought but also then with their end goal being well we want to redevelop the oil terminal so the challenge always about being real realistic and about being realistic about what you can do being realistic about your prospects of success and also think i think you know when you’re bringing together legal teams and campaigners who are very passionate about the overall issue about protecting our environment you know that the law cannot address that you know one legal challenge can’t address the overarching aim or you know goal of the of the organisation or of

14:19.26

Maria McCloskey

environmental campaigners in general you have to focus in on one thing realise okay well we can stop it this one way but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be stopped and it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to achieve the end goal of protecting our environment but I think once everybody you know is fully on the same page about that and still recognises that, yes, this is an important step for us to take as part of the overall um campaign and and and then move forward with that information. I think that that’s really important at the outset. But also, you know, what is it going to cost? What are the risks?

14:55.92

Maria McCloskey

What, you know, are we prepared for those risks? Does that mean any risk to any individual? Does that mean any risk to the organization? You know, so it’s about… pulling all of those things into the conversations at the outset and continuing to have them as things move forward.

15:12.46

Maria McCloskey

But I think that that’s part of the beauty of public interest litigation because, you know, i am public interest at litigation is about sort of advancing the space for others. um You know, that’s kind of the nuts and bolts of it, albeit that you’re doing through different legal challenges.

15:31.16

Maria McCloskey

so yeah i think that that was a challenge but also then once you’ve acknowledged it as challenge and addressed it then you can all move forward um uh from the same perspective. And just one other sort of challenge I think is, um you know, legal literacy in general.

17:02.27

Maria McCloskey

I mean, we talk lawyers and and anybody in the human rights space, we maybe talk kind of freely about judicial reviews, about certain terms that come with the space and it not necessarily being in the vocabulary of the campaigners, the people who are you know who are working on planning applications is not necessarily the lingo that they’re used to And so ah for us, it was very important that we break that down as much as possible and keep the lines of communication open because And our space in working in sort of pro bono allows for that because we can take it very much at a pace that suits whoever we are working with.

17:41.82

Maria McCloskey

It’s more difficult whenever you talk about fee paying clients because you know time is money and all of that. and But I think that that can lead to difficulties in some cases where things are just moving and and you have to go with it. But If everybody in the campaign doesn’t necessarily know what’s happening and why, that can be a challenge. It’s not necessarily. and I just feel that for people to properly buy in to the whole process, it’s better that they know exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. So, again, another challenge that we that we had to overcome.

18:19.77

Jen Ang

Thanks, Maria, for those really thoughtful reflections. I think you’re I think you’re being a wee bit modest about your readiness to take on this case. But also, I certainly recognize myself from practice, the idea that and that legal challenges are sort of novel novel and types of public interest litigation always sits in an area and for anyone that’s just a little bit outside what’s been done before sometimes. And actually, there’s an element of not just assembling your your team and acknowledging the expertise of others, but also just perhaps bravery in um and taking on something new or taking on something different.

21:03.38

Jen Ang

And now turning to the legal case itself, um just to make sure our listeners understand, what was the change in the law that the campaign sought to secure? And what was the significance for for them um in terms of what they were fighting for?

21:19.41

Maria McCloskey

So I suppose that the this sort of public interest litigation case was, you know, it’s one of those cases that’s not necessarily about the change in the law because the law was there, but the law hadn’t been complied with. So it’s about and adherence to the laws that already exist because, you know, as you know yourself, Jen,

21:40.31

Maria McCloskey

it’s ah it’s a huge battle to get a piece of law across the line and then it’s many more battles to ensure that whoever is um required to complies with those laws and so this was really about adherence to the legal principles and commitments and that this particular legal challenge was was looking to address um And again, I suppose that’s maybe going back to the previous question in terms of challenges. and You know, you need a law upon which to bring a challenge. And sometimes that can be a challenge in and of itself.

22:17.75

Maria McCloskey

And you may be you may also have to be selective about what aspects of the case are um ripe for legal challenge and because obviously campaign groups feel very strongly maybe that um if we were to take a ah bird’s eye view of this this doesn’t ah comply with the Paris Agreement or the commitments made at that time but we have to look at the arena in which we’re challenging it in which we have to challenge it in the first instance and what the laws are applicable to um there’s this region and so that’s where I suppose the the legal expertise and the campaign itself have to come together and and be clear about that and be clear about maybe the niche aspect of this particular challenge but that ultimately that will help

23:02.81

Maria McCloskey

address the overall aim of the of the campaign and the organisation. um So I think, and yeah, this this challenge obviously the did help achieve that aim. It it highlighted that um the council involved in this case didn’t comply with its legal obligations effectively and through this legal challenge got the borough council in Mid and East Antrim to admit to their failing in that regard and so you know as a success in one sense but not not in the overall the overall battle I suppose

23:40.85

Jen Ang

Do you think the case had the impact you’d hoped?

24:12.87

Maria McCloskey

What I can say is that the the legal challenge that we brought this time last year was hugely significant um in a number of respects.

24:30.45

Maria McCloskey

um you know, having the council admit in open court that they’ve breached a legal requirement, you know, I think it it’s huge because and that’s what these types of cases really, I mean, when you talk about the judicial review, you’re never going to get money, you’re never going to get them to overturn the decision, but to get the council to admit that was wrong and ultimately the aim is it will comply by its legal obligations on the next time round.

24:55.99

Maria McCloskey

And even though the council didn’t admit to the other breaches that we had raised in the proceedings, you know, they didn’t necessarily have to admit to them because they already admitted to the one breach that meant that the planning application was quashed.

Jen Ang

Maria explained here that the decision to grant planning application on this occasion that the Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal campaigners were challenging was “quashed.” Quashing is one type of remedy or order that a court can be asked to make when you are challenging the lawfulness of a public action. It means that the decision to grant the planning application is nullified or withdrawn, and everyone returns to the position as if the application had never been granted.

25:11.97

Maria McCloskey

But it was hugely important in you know the sense that they know that this organisation is keeping a very close eye on what they’re doing. They know that this organisation has legal support. we They know that this organisation has community and wider support within you know um the whole region.

25:30.45

Maria McCloskey

And so the importance of holding governments and, um you know, public authorities to account using the law, that is what we want to try and achieve because we’re not the lawmakers, but certainly we, you know, and it shouldn’t have to be, I think, I always think it shouldn’t have to be up to small community organisations to make sure that public authorities are doing what they should do. But that’s the world in which we live.

25:58.26

Maria McCloskey

But certainly when you are you know when a public authority knows that kind of you’re on to them then hopefully they will and do everything correctly on the next occasion and I suppose that then what what happens going forward um you know obviously that part of the the case will properly be presented or the planning application will properly be complied with on the next occasion but whether there are other failings maybe some that we addressed that uh keep the the door open for legal challenge.

27:01.40

Jen Ang

if you needed to do this again today, would you would you run the case the same? And do you think the outcome would be the same or different? Or is it just hard to say?

27:26.48

Maria McCloskey

Yeah, I suppose it is hard to say and because, ah you know, a year on, if I was still involved in the case, I would certainly feel much more confident in my knowledge of planning law and all all those sorts of things.

But I think if the case came to us in the same way that it did, last year you know I think we would probably address it in the same way now maybe we’d be slightly more efficient in certain things um but I think that the way that we dealt with that request for legal support was the epitome of what PILS is and what it does for community organisations and there was a real um you know I think a sense of achievement not only for the PILS team and the uh organisation and the pro bono lawyers that were involved but for the wider community and for the wider kind of um climate justice environmental uh

28:27.37

Maria McCloskey

campaign community it was hugely hugely important and hugely motivational and inspirational in a sense because um there was there were other benefits to the success that weren’t just directly related to the case.

29:06.84

Maria McCloskey

I think the consequence of it was um hugely important for other organisations. organisations for other campaigns for other people who are living in their community and potentially facing you know the same or similar types of challenges where there’s an application for planning permission or something’s being done to their local environment um or area in which they live and you always feel this sense of well what can I do and actually I think this this case proved that there’s a whole lot that you can do and you can be hugely impactful

31:48.85

Maria McCloskey

Despite the fact that there’s maybe not the equality of arms, you know, we’re talking about government departments that are, you know, hugely resourced in terms of their legal capacity um and um and all of that versus, well, when there’s where there’s a will, there’s a way kind of thing. So, yeah, I think for me, it was it was just.

32:10.85

Maria McCloskey

such a wonderful and valuable experience for me personally, but more so to be part of it, you know, because when, when you succeed by yourself, that’s one thing, but when you exist succeed because of the impact of, or input of a number of people,

32:26.32

Maria McCloskey

It’s just so heartwarming. And, you know, I attended an event shortly after and the sense in the room was one of positivity, where I think in previous years in these spaces, has very been much been, and I don’t want to say defeatist because there’s so many um you know campaigners organisers people who work tirelessly on these issues but there maybe was a sense of well the legal system’s not going to help us or you know it’s not it’s not worth our time because you know there it’s not going to be successful and this kind of showed them

30:29 .70

Jen Ang

Well, I’m feeling, I am feeling as inspired just listening, but I also, I can sort of hear in your reflection, and it’s, again, it’s interesting for me, from my perspective as a kind of a peer practitioner. um It sounds very much like and you and your the team at PILS as well felt that you gained so much from being a part of this experience, you know, as much as you contributed your skills, I can just sort of, I can see the smile on your face, I can hear it in your voice.

33:47.79

Jen Ang

and This reflection that in some ways it sounds like you were, you felt lucky to be able to if be a part of this piece of work.

33:55.70

Jen Ang

So standing back, this is sort of my final big question, and then we’ll move to a closing question. But standing back, For you, what more needs to be done to secure justice in this space?

34:59.22

Maria McCloskey

Yeah, it’s a great question and I think it’s it’s a number of strands of things need to happen. I mean, from… The perspective of say PILS and other you know organisations or firms, even of lawyers who are trying to work on these issues, I think it has to be properly financed and resourced.

35:20.14

Maria McCloskey

I mean, can’t continue to rely on pro bono um legal expertise to fight these cases or to support these cases being brought before the courts. There has to be access to the arenas and there has to be an element of equality of arms in that.

35:37.08

Maria McCloskey

So, you know, I would like to see more investment in legal challenges of this nature, be that through government funding um or ah probably an and through community or sorry, foundations and charitable donors providing the support for these types of cases to be taken forward because, you know, the amount of time involved in preparing a case like this which actually didn’t go to a full judicial review hearing um you know it was it was huge and I probably didn’t have a full appreciation of myself but I certainly think many people don’t have a full appreciation of the fact that it’s the time um and you know

36:27.54

Maria McCloskey

the expertise required to go into it. So I think it’s unfair to expect that organisations take this without being financially supported. mentioned earlier,

36:40.91

Maria McCloskey

this is about making sure that public authorities abide by their obligations and their legal responsibilities. You nearly shouldn’t have to be doing it, but you know, the world we live in, we do have to do it.

36:52.77

Maria McCloskey

And so that being the case, I think that there should be an aspect of investment in making sure that institutions and um public authorities are are held accountable.

37:05.41

Maria McCloskey

So, I think also just that equality of arms, which comes from, you know, having the resources and having the the finances to be able to challenge equally, I think is hugely important.

37:57.70

Maria McCloskey

Because you know this all happens in complex legislation and these and requirements go into very, very dense pieces of legislation, which sometimes are very difficult to break down for lawyers, speaking personally again, nevermind for people who are trying to navigate this.

38:14.41

Maria McCloskey

in the context of an issue that has arisen in their community so there’s like access to justice doesn’t just mean having money to go to court it means understanding the legal obligations that exist um and so you know how can you hold someone to account if you don’t understand what the what they you know where they’re supposed to be in carrying out their duties um so I think sort of investment in education pieces around that is also t to making the system work more effectively in the future.

39:04.16

Jen Ang

So I have one final question and it is this. So um throughout this podcast series, there will be people out there listening who are perhaps and activists already or thinking about the law. Um And they might be looking at what you’ve accomplished today and and and who you are now, and they might even want to be you. So my question for you is, do you have some advice for a younger version of you or maybe just someone who is curious about, you know, keen to m forge a career like yours and that you would share with our listeners now?

39:39.04

Maria McCloskey

yeah sure I mean to think that somebody would want to be like me it’s very it’s funny for us and um in this part of the world where we think no no no I haven’t achieved very much or um You know, I still feel in one sense that I have so much more you know, there’s so much more I have to learn um to feel very comfortable. But then I’ve also got to the point in my career where maybe you never feel really, really comfortable, but you just accept that.

40:07.83

Maria McCloskey

work with the the knowledge that you have in this point in time and never be afraid to admit that you don’t know something. I mean, this was a key. um This was a prime example of that. When the group came, we had discussions in the office and I don’t know where whether um the members Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal know this, but it was like, oh, can we do this? Oh, I don’t know.

40:30.84

Maria McCloskey

And me probably mostly saying, you know And it was just because my name as the solicitor would go on the papers, not that it was I thought it was all down to me, because it certainly was a team effort and the vast majority of the real hard work was done by others, including Hilary and Kate and Emma.

40:47.45

Maria McCloskey

But actually having those conversations, I’m not being afraid to say, I’m not sure, and I feel a bit shaky here, and others around you actually supporting you.So yeah, I think just and not being afraid to say you’re not sure and then having those discussions with others because they can remind you Well, yes, you can do it.

41:36.36

Maria McCloskey

You’re a qualified lawyer. And um you know first of all, you’re you’re allowed to do it. You’re allowed to kind of learn about it. You don’t have to know everything at the outset. And also, it doesn’t just depend on you doing all the work.

41:47.49

Maria McCloskey

And that was very, very obvious in this case, because Emma, Hillary and Kate, they I mean talk about a team effort. It really was everybody kind of coming together and taking the burden on, the burden being you know the huge responsibility of getting this right um so I think that um you know inspiring get being inspired by others around me and then giving me the confidence was hugely important in this particular case and so what I would say to aspiring lawyers or aspiring you know people who want to go further in their career I recall when I talked about moving into the human rights and sector that you know a lot of people I spoke to said, well, yeah, that’s very interesting, but you you know you won’t get a job in that space.

42:37.85

Maria McCloskey

And um you know I just kept working on the issues that were important to me and that I was interested in researching, you know going to events, being in the spaces and letting this you know i’m huge amount of knowledge just keep penetrating and then eventually feeling well actually I do know something now that in itself gives me the confidence to say well I’ll maybe look into this issue on behalf of someone I’ll maybe just take on this one query and that just builds and builds over time and so you know it’s hard work but it’s a lifetime’s work I don’t ever think that there’s a final destination and you get there and you go ah what I’m doing in this human rights space I mean you know Jen as well it’s so vast It actually keeps changing on a daily basis. You know that you have to keep yourself up to speed with the changes.

43:28.16

Maria McCloskey

But if you’re committed to it, if you’re passionate about it, it definitely and you will get there. And I think the world kind of opens up opportunities to you when you’re in the right headspace, when you’re in the right space.

43:43.12

Maria McCloskey

place and you know you go to the right things you speak to the right people people that know a bit more than you um or a lot more than you um and you know I suppose just being humble that I’ve now come to accept that I don’t always get it right and sometimes I’m not really sure what I’m doing but if you have others around you who are supporting you um then that that’s really what you need

44:08.23

Jen Ang

Oh, thank you. Thank you for that. and Wise and warm. And I would also say strangely reassuring advice.

44:15.30

Maria McCloskey

[Laughs]

44:15.95

Jen Ang

feel like I feel like, Maria, if I ever sort of have some doubt in my career, the stage that I’ve reached, I’m just going to need to ring you up and ask you to tell me that again. Because, I mean, I think what you said really rings true. I um I see that I see that humility, but also that really strong sense of um mutual support and solidarity in the PILS team. And I I also recognize that in other, you know, legal teams and campaigns that I’ve been a part of.

45:17.97

Maria McCloskey

And I think just one final point that you kind of have sparked, um you know, that reminds me to to make clear in any avenue or in any channel that I can, like this space needs all the help it can get. U m If you are thinking about a career in human rights, please pursue that interest and don’t give up on it because the the corporate and commercial world, I feel, is growing.

45:46.31

Maria McCloskey

whilst the human rights space is sort of under pressure at the moment. and There are many critical issues happening both at home and further afield that we really need kind of all hands on deck um with at the moment so it may not be the most financially rewarding but it’s certainly the most personally rewarding um from my experience and I can highly recommend it um to anyone who’s thinking about it as a career.

46:16.32

Jen Ang

Yeah, 100%. um Thank you so much for your time, Maria. and um As I said, I could I could speak to you all afternoon, and but I won’t take any more of your hospitality or your time today.

46:35.84

Maria McCloskey

Thank you very much, Jen. It was great to chat to you.

Jen Ang

I caught up with the PILS team this week, for a follow up on this case, and they told me that SWOT and PILS are still working together closely. They explained:

Mid and East Antrim Borough Council’s planning committee now need to make a fresh decision on whether or not this fossil fuel infrastructure should be given planning permission.

In SWOT’s own words: “We got a stay of execution – but we still need to stop the development. A revised application for this unnecessary and unwanted fossil fuel infrastructure is now with the Council.”

SWOT are asking local communities and supporters to take action, speak to their local elected represntatives and lodge an objection. They’ve got a handy template letter on their website: stopwhiteheadoilterminal.org

Since SWOT went to court, it’s clear from the updated environmental information submitted to the Council by the developer that this proposed fossil fuel infrastructure would have a massive impact on emissions and the region’s ability to meet any emissions targets. We are all waiting to see how the Council responds. This is definitely one to watch!

Thanks so much to you the listener, for tuning into the Lawmanity podcast.

In our next episode, we’ll doing something a little bit different – we’ll be kicking off a series of three themed episodes bringing together individual conversations we’ve had with 11 incredible Scottish activist leaders, to ask them to reflect on the connection between law and real social change. We asked them whether the law treats them and their communities equally, about whether the think the law is a tool, or a barrier to change, and what justice looks like to them. Their answers are frank, honest and – pure dynamite. Tune in in two weeks’ time, if you want to hear what they had to say!

if you loved this podcast, please do hit the subscribe button and also like and share our episodes with friends and colleagues who might enjoy learning a little bit about how the law really works in practice, and how it can be used to make the world a better brighter place.

Our podcast has been generously supported by a grant from the Clark Foundation for Legal Education. The Lawmanity podcast is co-produced by me, your host Jen Ang, and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe, and the music you’ve been listening to is “Always on the Move” by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow-based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.

Transcript: Breaking barriers: Access to Education for Young Migrants, with Andy Sirel

Jen — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:32:15 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Andy Sirel

“Access to education for migrants in Scotland has been something that was sort of on my casework radar for a very long time. And obviously for those eligible, we’re lucky enough in Scotland to have a situation where tuition fees are paid for by the government if you’re eligible, but access to that, to further and higher education is not equal.“

Jen Ang

Welcome to the Lawmanity Podcast where we explore the complex relationship between law and activism and discuss the different ways that law can oppress people but can also lead to real social change.

Jen Ang

Welcome everyone to the Lawmanity podcast. This week we’re speaking to legend, human rights lawyer and one of my very favourite people, Andy Sirel. Andy is a co-founding partner and legal director for the legal charity JustRight Scotland. He’s responsible for supervision of legal casework across a number of different areas of the charity’s work. In 2023 he was named Solicitor of the Year by the Herald Scotland Law Awards in recognition of his dedication throughout his legal career to using the law and human rights to achieve justice for people facing disadvantage, exclusion and discrimination. And for his groundbreaking work in challenging the exclusion of migrant young people in Scotland from tuition fee support in a case we will be discussing in today’s podcast. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy Sirel

Thank you very much for having me, you and looking forward to it.

Jen Ang

Great. So it’s lovely to see you and as I said at the start, this is such a great excuse to catch up as well because I can never have too much time with you, but you’re a very busy person.

Ah, as a kind of opener for this set of podcasts, I have been thinking about, a question that just gets us settled, and also helps us to learn a little bit about the person behind the legal legend we’re interviewing. A good friend of mine pointed out to me that our sense of smell is one of our oldest senses and observed that we can hold deep connections between our sense of smell and our memories. So if you don’t mind, can you tell me about a smell that’s meaningful to you?

Andy Sirel

That is a good question. I’d probably have a couple. the first one would be sun lotion because it reminds me frankly of being on holiday, in a sunny place that’s not Scotland. It’s not very often you apply it in Scotland. In fact, I don’t think I sell it here. but the second one would definitely be a freshly cut grass. Cause it just reminds me of like walking my dog in the evenings, sort of long, sunny, Scottish evenings. but the downside is that I have really bad hay fever, so I’m actually allergic to it. but nonetheless, nonetheless it does, it does give me good memories.

Jen Ang

Oh, the irony. And I love that. I love that both of those things are places and times that are far from your working desk. So holiday and after tools are down. I think that’s both relatable and also probably really healthy.

Andy Sirel

I think so.

Jen Ang

Cool. Well, thank you for indulging, my silly surprise question. so now we’ll kind of turn to, the topic of the podcast proper.

So, as I said before, we’re here to help listeners understand how the law can be used to achieve really significant change. and I’ve asked today that we look at your groundbreaking legal challenge in the Ola Jasim case against Scottish Ministers, which was a case where you established that the Scottish tuition fee regulations were in breach of the human right to education for some migrant people living in Scotland. And I wanted to see if we could talk to you about your role in that case, a little bit about your relationship with the wider Our Grades, Not Visas campaign.

And also your reflections. now, believe it or not, two and a half years on from, that case being hurt, that’s gone very quickly, those two years. So, to start with, for our listeners, can you just explain to us how you got involved with this case and actually what was at stake? So why was it that when you heard about this case, you thought that something had to be done and that it was actually litigation that was going to have to be the answer?

Andy Sirel

Yeah. Okay. So access to education for, for migrants in Scotland has been something that was sort of on my, casework radar for a very long time, probably dating back to about 2015, I would say. I mean, the issue is this. So everybody technically has a right to education in Scotland. They can access school, further higher education. And obviously for those eligible who’re lucky enough in Scotland to have a situation where tuition fees are paid for by the government if you’re eligible, but access to that, to, further and higher education is not equal.

The barrier is funding. Can you get the funding to go? And folks with some types of immigration status did not qualify for, Scottish government funding and did not qualify for what we call home fees status. They were treated essentially as international students. And of course, without funding or with a really high amount of tuition to pay, then you’re not going to be able to go. So, like I say, this was, an issue that was really prevalent in our work for a long time.

In 2015, there was a Supreme Court case about it that affected my casework. it was a case called Tigere or Tigere And, it introduced a criteria that said if you have a visa in the UK and you’ve lived here for a long time, then on the basis of your long residence you can get access to education. And so that changed the picture in Scotland a little bit. It allowed some people to have access to education, who are migrants, are from a migrant background, but really not everybody.

And so what we were seeing in our work was the community groups that we were working with and some of our clients actually at the time were very involved in activism and advocacy and they were raising the issue with the government. Time, time again, you know, directly to the Cabinet Secretary for Education, for example. And nothing was being done. Perhaps there was piecemeal progress, you would say. So the rules are being changed in reaction to world events like, you know, the Ukraine war, so Ukrainians were given access to education. Afghan resettlement schemes, Afghans were given access. But there was no broader recognition that, everybody else was basically being blocked out.

So we’re in a situation where it was very clearly an issue. The community groups were and the folks affected were deeply impacted by it and were trying their very best to sway the government but it just wasn’t working. So the reality is then that one of the, you know, you need to recognise one of the best tools in the shed, so to speak, is litigation, particularly litigation using the Human Rights Act, because that is a way in Scotland where you can challenge a lot and if you’re successful the law gets like ripped up and the government have to start again.

So, you know, we, I took the view, we took the view that we needed an individual in order to be the sort of standard bearer to take this case. And that’s not always the easiest thing because when you’re taking a case like this you need an individual, or with a really strong case. You know, to term it’s sometimes called as a good facts case. I don’t like that term particularly because anybody who’s affected by this should be able to have their day in court.

But we needed a really strong case to demonstrate like significant harm that this, that the education laws were causing. Because if we didn’t and we lose, then actually we’re back to square one and the government probably are unlikely to do anything.

And so we found a wonderful young person, who was referred to as by an MSP Her name is Ola and she was a straight A student out of school. She born in Iraq, lived here since she was just turned 11 years old so she moved just after she was 11. Educated here, you know obviously a very very clever person and got an unconditional offer to go and study at Dundee University to study medicine which is good because we need more medicine people, we need more medics, we need more doctors. And yeah she was told that she couldn’t study and couldn’t.

Well she was told that she couldn’t get student funding because in the first day of her course she was 17 years old and she needed to live in the UK for seven years and she’d lived in the UK for 58 days short of that. So she was so close and if she applied when she turned 18 she would have needed nine years. So actually the distance between her being able to access funding was just going tp grow and grow. So she didn’t apply for funding in the first year she went to university.

Dundee were really good the university they said you know we’ll just treat you as a home fee students or your fees are lower. But still her family were in real financial hardship in order to try and pay her fees. And then the second year she did apply you know after she met us and the student funding body said no you were not eligible on the first day of your first year. So you will never ever be eligible on this course. Even if you became British tomorrow you will never be eligible for this course. You need to stop and start again which was obviously grossly grossly unfair.

So you know she, she became the sort of standard bearer the public standamard be I should say through the case there was another case behind her that we had for another client of mine in slightly different circumstances. But the reason why we needed that individual is because that was the way we were re going to directly challenge the law. But you’re not going to be able to create progressive change with just a legal case. You need something else. And this is where the campaign came in.

The Our Grades Not Visas campaign founded by a young called Ahmed Al Hindi who was a six year pupil at the time. also affected by these strict access to education regulations and together with Maryhill Integration Network JustRight Scotland we set up this campaign which started raising the profile of the issue. It started directly engaging the Scottish government. It was doing media but really importantly it did a survey asking folks in Scotland you know are you affected by this? Tell us your story. And that gave us lots and lots of rich data and it told us that these rules were actually impacting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in Scotland. So, you know, the idea was that we took the individual legal case, we took the campaign, we put them together and we see where things go from there.

BBC Anchor

Let’s talk about another issue involving refugees living here. Scottish Ministers are being forced to change the law on tuition fees for hundreds of migrant students after a landmark court case.Lawyers successfully argued that Ola Jasim from Iraq who’d lived in Scotland for more than nine years did have her human rights breached. The straight A pupil was told she couldn’t access tuition fees because she missed out on the time threshold by just 56 days. The Scottish government says it is committed to a fair funding system.

Ola Jasim

This is what like I call my home. So to me I’m a Scottish citizen and so to be told that no you’re not and like I’m not getting the treatment as all my friends who I want to primary like since primary school with until high school we graduated together just to be discriminated against like that, that kind of just made me feel, kind of like, feel like unwelcome. My sisters for example, for their birthday, they just didn’t want to celebrate it because they’re like o, you know, like we don’t need to buy a cake even like for me, myself I just felt like all of these things were just extra things and like we need to save money on those things. But it’s like these are little things that kind of give you joy in life and like just keep you going. Now that I know that it’s like if the law is changing and hopefully there will be compensation for people who are affected. Hopefully like a lot of people’s lives will be changed because this isn’t just me that’s gotten really badly affected. There’s so many people out there.

Jen Ang

And I mean, that is so interesting actually both, you know, how you outline for listeners, you know, the thinking that goes into, you know, working out what a strategic case looks like and when it is appropriate to take one, but also that relationship between the legal work and the campaign, which has been really visible actually throughout, not just the case, but what has happened afterwards.

So I guess my question is, were there challenges in, in preparing the case or in coordinating with the campaign?

Andy Sirel

Yeah, that’s a good question. So I think that the campaign and the litigation were complementary to each other and there was a lot of cross coordination, but they were also separate. So for example, the founder of the campaign, Ahmed, was not a litigant in the case. we aren’t talking about his situation at all in the court action. Ah. And you know, we need, we always need these situations to be careful and make sure that the campaign see themselves as distinct from the litigation. we need the litigation to remain, own, its own thing and focusing on the strengths of the particular person that we had. the campaign was also slightly broader.

It was looking not just at, ah, migrants with leave to remain, which is what the case was about, but it was also looking at asylum seekers. And so, you know, we needed also to make sure that there was some distinction there. Because I think if we were in court arguing, you know, fundamentally a human rights case for asylum seekers to get access to student funding, then that would change the nature of the case entirely. It would possibly have resulted in a different outcome. So again, we needed to keep the two things, separate there. I think the final challenge would be, you know, finding the time to sort of input the technical information to allow the campaign to do its thing. You know, this is what the law says, this is what it doesn’t say, et cetera, but. And also actually run the legal case at the same time.

But as you say, we have very dedicated staff and yeah, we had, you know, our participation manager was the person that was running point for JustRight Scotland on the campaign. And that allowed me to sort of get my head down with my colleague Maisie and and our advocate in order to follow through the case. The last thing I’d say is that the case attracted a lot of media attention. and you know, as a lawyer, you’re. I’m typically cautious around media attention because you just don’t know how it’s going to be spun. we turned down a lot of media requests from outlets that we know go just been in certain things in a certain way.

But yeah, we were able to form a really good relationship with a particular journalist, who you know, told it like it is. That’s all we asked, just to tell it like it is. And you. We wanted also to be very careful and, and very, very protective of my clients in general. But I was very protective to this particular client to make sure that she wasn’t subject to any unpleasantness in the public eye. And thankfully we were able to navigate that, probably all down to the fact that she’s a far better media performer than I am and and performed impeccably. So yeah, those were some of the challenges that we needed to navigate as we were going through it.

Jen Ang

So just to make sure that our listeners understand, can you kind of briefly summarise what was the outcome of the actual case and what was the significance both for your client and then for other people like her?

Andy Sirel

Sure. So the case was challenging the parts of the funding regulations that said if you’ve got leave to remain in the uk, that isn’t permanent, so limited leave to remain, then, and you’re under 18 on the first day of your course, you need to have lived in the UK for seven years and if you’re over 18 you need to live in the UK for half your life. so those were the two parts of the rules that we were challenging. We were saying, you know, this long residence is actually really exclusion rate for a lot of people who are, you know, educated and raised in Scotland.

One of the other cases that we had actually was a young guy who was in care, he was raised by the state and then when he sought to access education, the state said no, you can’t access education, which is plainly wrong. So we were arguing, you know, four fundamental questions which your listeners might really chew over, to be honest with you.

The first one is to what extent is your length of residence in a place and appropriate measure of how integrated you are into your country? So if you’ve lived in Scotland for six years, 300 days, are you less integrated than you are having lived in the UK for 366 days? Probably not.

The second question was is it fair that there’s that cliff edge, you know, 17 year old needs, 7 years and 18 year old needs many years. Is it fair that there’s that cliff edge for young people who are the same person on the 18th birthday as the bear and the last day of their 17th year? And we were asking, is that year one rule fair? You know, if you’re ineligible in day one, year one, even if you become British, you will never be eligible for student funding. Is that fair?

And then fundamentally the ultimate question to the court was, is this a violation of the right to access education guaranteed by Article 2, Protocol 1 of the European Convention, and is it discriminatory on the basis of immigration status? And the court said to those questions, yes, it is discriminatory, yes, it is a violation of the right to education. and so they struck down those elements of the law. and this was a huge, you know, this was a, a huge win and a real recognition of the toil and the harm that it had caused Ola and her family.

But, the upshot of it was that the government, Scottish government, needed to do two things really quickly. The first thing they needed to do was they needed to set up an interim scheme because you had hundreds of students in the last two academic years who had not been, who had not applied or who had applied for funding, had been refused illegally. And so they set up a scheme to basically pay them, give them the tuition that they should have got in the first place.

Second thing they need to do is think about this new law. The old law’s been struck down, we need a new one. So they needed to do an impact assessment to understand who and how people were affected. And they needed to do a public consultation to see what law would like. And this is where the campaign kicks in. Okay? This is where, this is where we need to understand the relationship in our litigation. And a campaign, the litigation opens the door, unlocks it and the campaign walks right through it. And the campaign, the campaign really stepped up here.

So we in order to reply to the impact assessment and the public consultation, so we JustRight Scotland, where, you know, we’re going to town hall events, where we’re hosting information sessions for folks affected just so they understood what the law, how the law was changing, what the court said, what the court didn’t see, and where those sort of pressure points are that they can really advance their views and express themselves about how it affects them.

And so the groups themselves, they organised, they responded to the consultation. And I have to say, when I heard some of the things they were asking for in the law, I did think that is admirable. I feel it’s unlikely because that’s not what the court said. but that just reveals my sort of ah, legal box which I view the world because I was totally wrong. And the upshot was that the Scottish Government passed a new law which came into force in August 2023.

So we’re coming up to the two year anniversary which abolished the long residence criteria altogether and just replaced it with the standard three year residence requirement that everybody has. Right. If you’re British or non British, everybody has this to access tuition in Scotland. And secondly it extended tuition fee support to asylum seeking children, both unaccompanied asylum seeking children and the kids of asylum seekers. and that was huge. That was an extension beyond which was even considered in the court case. It was just a pure result of quality and coordinated advocacy and campaigning. And that’s where we are now.

Jen Ang

That’s fantastic. And I love your kind of, your modest reflection about, your feelings about asking for more politically, than a legal case required. But it was a triumph of the campaign and also just a really wonderful result that in this particular case, and this doesn’t always happen, you know, the success in the legal case did open the door, as you said, ah, for a political decision, that was broader and that reached many, many more people, than actually the narrow holding of the judgement. So, it is a great thing to remember and reflect on, even though we are two and a half years down the line. So I’m going to kind of pull together the next two questions in a one or really.

So you have spoken a lot about the wider impact that the case has already had. and I guess I just wanted your reflections. I think people find this interesting as the person who led the case, if this came to you again today, would you run it the same? But also, do you think the outcome would be the same or different or, you know, just your thoughts on. And have things changed in the last few years? Do you think?

Andy Sirel

That is a good question. I mean, I think that there would be a temptation to gather loads and loads and loads of evidence and demonstrate, you know, in a great deal of detail, you know, then that hundreds and hundreds of 100 people are impacted because doesn’t, present that as part of the case. We didn’t actually include some of the survey stuff in the case. We really did focus down on Ola as an individual and her family. and there’s a temptation to think, well, if we are able to show the broader impact, and then that would, you know, that would be a smart thing to do in the case.

But then when I was thinking about this, you know, there’s also the chance that that gives something to the other side. They can say, well, you know, this is not a small thing we’re talking about here. This is a lot of public money we’re talking about here. you know, and the governments tend to have quite a wide discretion in the legal term we use as margin of appreciation. It just means that the courts give quite a lot of like, deference and latitude to governments about how they spend public money, especially in social, issues like education.

And so, you know, you always need to think, am I doing something? And what are the unintended consequences of it? Is that actually the right way to go about it? and so, yeah, if I’m honest with you, I would probably think that Would kind of caught the sweet spot with with the case that we brought, but that was 10 years in the making. You know, I’d worked with many, many individuals who had been blocked from education and their cases probably weren’t strong enough to get us over the line. And if you think about it in I alternate universe we had this wonderful campaign and all the media and then we lost the case. You know, there’s no guarantee at all that we would have got to where we got to. In fact probably, probably we wouldn’t have done because the government were very clearly defending it.

So yeah, it’s difficult, it’s difficult to say whether it would have been a different, a different outcome. But I mean the impact of it is beyond what I could have expected, particularly the inclusion of asylum seeking young people. And I mean I’ve seen it in m. My day to day since you know there’s a. We’ve some other clients of our organisation whose kids are now at university that you know, the mums and dads are still in the asylum system but they’re all now studying, you know, X, Y and Z, at university which they just weren’t able to do two years ago. and even myself, you know I do some teaching at different institutions from time to time and I. On two occasions in the last 18 months or so I’ve I’ve had students in the class come up to me afterwards and say, you know, I’m actually here because of that judgement, and that campaign, which is very. Which I have say is very nice if not slightly surreal.

Jen Ang

I have to say that’s. No, that’s amazing and well deserved. and just underscore what you said, you know, I agree. what’s not visible to the public is actually how long you can be thinking about working up a case or how long you can be aware of an issue before the right case actually comes. And because obviously it’s only when the case hits the press and you know most of the work is done. The rest of the world is alive to the idea unfortunately, sometimes to our opponents as well. It’s only when the case, it’s depressed that they’re fully paying attention.

So onto my last question, which is what more needs to be done to secure justice for people like Ola and the other young people that you’ve worked with.

Andy Sirel

Yeah, I mean there’s a very clear one for me. So there is some unfinished business that one of the things we attempted to argue in the case or we argued in the case, but it didn’t, it didn’t come through in the final judgement, was that there needs to be an our view anyway, some form of discretion. You know, remember, Ola was only 58 days short. You know, the other young person we’re working for was about 65 days short. And know, okay, there needs to be a line in the sand because you need to determine, you need to draw the line somewhere.

But for exceptional cases, not having any discretion at all, is I, think unfair. And I’ll give you an example. We’re working with an individual right now who is a British citizen, and also a Sudanese citizen. And he and his family were evacuated from Sudan because of the outbreak of the war. And he arrived in the, in Scotland, in 2023, sought to access, ah, an education course here, and was told, oh, you’ve not lived here for three years. you know, you’re a British citizen, but you’ve not lived here for three years, so you’re an international student. And he said, well know I’m a British citizen and you know, the only reason that I’m not, I, wasn’t here for three years is because I was in Sudan. And you know, you’ve evacuated me and the rules say, well no, now here’s the thing. If he was not British, he could go through the asylum process and become a refugee and I get access to education straight away. if he had fled Ukraine, in the rules, there’s something for British nationals. You know, if you were British and you were in Ukraine, you can now access education. If he was from Afghanistan, if you lived in Afghanistan, it would be the same thing, but there’s nothing for Sudan. and you know,

I’m probably not in favour of just the government bolting on new exceptions to the regulations. I’m in favour of somebody looking at his case and saying, yeah, you’re a de facto refugee, and it’s not fair and you should be able to access education here. So there’s still some stuff left and we’re gonna have a go at his case and see where it gets to. But yeah, I think that I suppose the last thing I’d say is that the law is really complicated in this area. It’s hard for people to manage it. It’s hard for me to wade through all the regulations. I don’t know how people do it by themselves. the colleges find it difficult. So the Government finds it difficult, and we need to have something that’s a bit more consolidated. So, you know, as ever, as ever, we’re not quite at the end of the road, yet. But that doesn’t mean to say we shouldn’t m. be grateful for the wins that have come so forth

Jen Ang

Absolutely. Well, I mean, I’m told on the idea that it would be useful for the decision maker to have discretion, but it would also be. It would be ironic if, after the intervention of a lawyer, the law was actually simplified. but I have no doubt that if anyone can do it, you can fire Bas. So good luck for that case, and, you know, and thank you so much for your time. You’ve been super generous.

I just have one final question for you, and that’s this. So there will be listeners, who tune into this podcast because, you know, they admire the work that, legal legends like you do. and so the question for them and for me is, what advice might you have for someone out there who could be a younger version of you or who’s looking at what you’ve accomplished today and wants to be you, basically, what would you say to them, at an earlier stage in their career about what they should be doing?

Andy Sirel

Oh, that’s a very embarrassing question. I would say, you need to be positive. You need to look for opportunities where other people see negatives. and I think that is something that, not everyone’s able to do, but, you know, we can if we try. and if I’m honest with you, you need to treat everybody, regardless of who they are, regardless of status or position or seniority or age or anything. You need to treat everybody the same with dignity, courtesy, interest. And only by doing that, do you learn a lot. You, are. You obtain people’s trust, and you’re honest, and then doors open and opportunities present themselves, but only by doing that and do you get their trust. And that is actually, you know, things go from there. So that those are the sort of very simple pieces of advice I would give.

Jen Ang

Amazing. I mean, thank you for that wise counsel. And having known you for a long time, I know that you absolutely live those values. and. And I think. I think. I think they do. I think they do work. So I’m one of those lucky people, who’s had the opportunity to know you, and also to have called on, ah, that relationship to ask you to spend this time with us. But I think it’s been really interesting and and’positive that people will find lots of bits to take away from this. So thanks again for your time today. and yeah, I hope you have a great afternoon. Maybe get to enjoy that freshly caught grass smell before the rain comes again. yeah. And I look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Andy Sirel

Thanks very much, Jen Take care.

Jen Ang

Thanks so much to you, the listener, for tuning in to the Lawmanity Podcast.

In our next episode we’ll be speaking to Maria McCloskey, former director solicitor at the Public Interest Litigation Support Unit in Northern Ireland, about litigation she led to support a community opposing the building of a major terminal on the shores of a peaceful rural coastal area of the Belfast Lough. The Stop Whitehead Oil Terminal case. If you loved this podcast, please do hit the subscribe button and also like and share our episodes with friends and colleagues who might enjoy learning a little bit more about how the law really works in practise and how it can be used to make the world a better, brighter place.

Our podcast has been generously supported by a grant from the Clark Foundation for Legal Education. The Lawmanity Podcast is co produced by me, your host Jen Ang and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe. And the music you’ve been listening to is Always on the Move by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.

Recorded 23 May 2025

Solidarity in pursuit of justice: art and dissent

Jen — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Long View loves street art, and Banksy – and most of all, this week’s contribution to the walls of the Royal Court of Justice, in London.

Banksy’s newest work shows a judge, in a traditional wig and gown, using a gavel to strike a protestor lying on the ground below him, holding up a blood-spattered placard. It appeared a day after the Met Police arrested nearly 900 people at Parliament Square protesting in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action.

Defend Our Juries, who organised the protest, made this statement: “Among the 857 arrestees were vicars and priests, war veterans and descendants of Holocaust survivors, retired teachers and healthcare workers,” and accused the police of making “many false claims” to justify arresting peaceful demonstrators with signs that read: “I oppose genocide – I support Palestine Action.”

Speaking for the Met Police, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart, issued this statement: “You can express your support for a cause without committing an offence under the Terrorism Act ... we have a duty to enforce the law without fear or favour. If you advertise that you are intending to commit a crime, we have no option but to respond accordingly.”

But what if, (hypothetically) all possible ways of expressing your support for a cause become an offence under the Terrorism Act?

“But that could never happen,” you might protest.

How certain are you? And what exactly do you know about the process for proscribing an organisation as a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act 2000 – an act that was widely criticised when passed as putting forward too broad a definition of “terrorism” and too few mechanisms for holding the state to account for abuse of those powers?

You be the judge:

Here is the explanatory memorandum prepared by the UK Home Office and laid before Parliament, with the draft order for proscription of Palestine Action (PA), alongside two other organisations: Maniacs Murder Cult (MMC) and Russian Imperial Movement (RIM).
Here is the debate in UK Parliament on 2 July 2025, during which MPs raised concerns and sought to differentiate the severity of the evidence with respect to PA as compared to MMC and RIM, and requested the option of voting separately on proscription of each organisation. Dan Jarvis, Minister of State for Security, refused, citing both precedent (this is the way we’ve always done it) and neutrality (refusing to unbundle possibly randomly bundled orders for proscription, somehow demonstrates that we are ideologically neutral).
Neutrality is, of course, a fiction in matters of politics. And here, finally, is the list of the 385 MPs who voted in favour of proscription, and the 20 MPs who voted against.

The process of criminalising behaviour, and of making your actions – however right or just or private or justifiable you think they might be – illegal, is in most cases, quite clear.

But once your behaviour is criminalised, enforcement against you is backed by the full powers of the state.

Protester with sign, Edinburgh, October 2024

The question that a human rights lawyer would ask – and that you should ask yourself (and keep asking yourself) is:

If this law were used against me, in circumstances where I feel I have acted reasonably, and my opponents have acted abusively, would the outcome be fair?

If you feel the answer is “no,” whether or not the law directly affects you today, consider whether – out of self interest, or solidarity – you should nevertheless do something to oppose, or reform, it.

For the record:

The punishment for supporting a group proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000, like Palestine Action, is up to a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment, or an unlimited fine.
The punishment for criminal damage – what Banksy’s latest work is being investigated as – is a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment.
The punishment for supporting a group that actually commits genocide…this is harder to calculate…for those of you reading this article who are criminal law experts, I’m all ears?

Some final thoughts

This is a picture of the site of Banky’s work a few days later: a foreboding shadow, after the fine detail has been scrubbed away.

The Hammer and the Gutter at the Royal Courts of Justice, London, removed Credit: Luster Magazine

There is something that sits uncomfortably, in this picture, and this political moment in the UK. The Met Police, and the justice system – in the name of defending the rule of law, the impartiality of the judiciary, prosecutorial discretion and the integrity of policing systems – being drawn into direct and visible conflict with a growing popular movement, committed to continuing to protest in favour of a cause – regardless of, and sometimes perhaps because of, the criminal consequences.

Assorted printed posters, Edinburgh

“When the law is used as a tool to crush civil liberties, it does not extinguish dissent – it strengthens it.” – Defend our Juries

…

If you enjoyed this brief interruption, and would like to continue thinking about the impact of Banksy’s latest work, I can recommend: Banksy’s erased mural: the irony of power by Ángela León Cervera

To learn more about your right to protest in Scotland, and practical solidarity: Scottish Community & Activist Legal Project

To donate to support Palestinians in Gaza: Medical Aid for Palestinians

First published on LinkedIn on 12 September 2025:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/solidarity-pursuit-justice-art-dissent-jen-ang-uwlee

Transcript: Justice for Women Who Kill, with Harriet Wistrich

Jen — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Harriet Wistrich

“We were looking at ways in which we could potentially hold the police accountable for their failures in their duty to protect.”

Jen Ang

Welcome to the Lawmanity Podcast where we explore the complex relationship between law and activism and discuss the different ways that law can oppress people but can also lead to real social change.

I’m Jen Ang, a human rights lawyer and activist based in Scotland and your host on the Lawmanity Podcast. This week we’re speaking to feminist activist, lawyer, and legend, Harriet Wistrich.

Harriet is the founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice and a solicitor of 25 years’ experience who worked for many years with renowned civil liberties firm, Birnberg Pierce Limited.

She has acted in many high-profile cases around violence against women, including on behalf of women who challenged police and parole board in the John Worboys case, women deceived in relationships by undercover police officers, and on behalf of women appealing murder convictions for killing abusive partners, most recently Sally Challen. She is also a founder member of the campaign group Justice for Women and trustee of the charity, the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize. Most recently, Harriet is the author of the 2024 book Sister-in-Law, a reflection on her most notable cases and what it’s like to fight for justice for women in a system designed for men. Welcome to the show again, Harriet, and it’s such a pleasure to have you.

Harriet Wistrich1:39

Hi, I’m very pleased to be here. Thank you.

Jen Ang 1:41

So in this podcast, I’ve been experimenting with a surprise opener question to get us settled and to learn a little more about the people behind the legal legends we’re interviewing. A good friend pointed out to me that our sense of smell is our oldest sense and observed that we can hold deep connections between the sense of smell and our memories. So if you don’t mind, could you please tell me a little bit about a smell that is meaningful for you, maybe one that you just really like, or one that’s connected to a place or a time that you like to bring to mind?

Harriet Wistrich 2:11

It’s a difficult question that but I would suggest the smell of the seaside. So when you go on a particularly on a nice bright sunny day to get away from the smoke down to the sea side and you kind of smell this fresh sea smell and hear the gulls and the, you know, kind of anticipation of that kind of freshness, that’s a nice smell I associate with getting away from things a little bit.

Jen Ang 2:49

I love that. I love that kind of grounding with nature and I can actually almost hear as well the sounds that go with that smell and I also reflect that as, you know, lawyers and activists spend a lot of time at their desks in meeting rooms and sort of working all hours. It’s actually quite a good reminder as well, the importance of stepping away or having a stopping place to go to.

So thank you so much for that, Harriet. Turning to the podcast topic for today.

So we’re here to help listeners understand how the law can be used to achieve really significant change by looking at how you and your colleagues throughout your career have led campaigns to shine a light on the ways in which the criminal justice system has failed to protect women and in particular women survivors and victims of violence.

So today I’d like to delve a little bit deeper into your role and ask you to tell us a little bit about the start of your journey. Can you explain a bit about how you got involved with this work and what it’s about and what was at stake that made you think that specifically law as a tool or legal intervention is what would be necessary to achieve the change that you were looking for?

Harriet Wistrich 3:56

Yes. Well, I didn’t actually start out as a career in the law at all. I was doing other things, exploring other ways of I guess my main ambition was around political change and feminist activism in particular. So that was always my big passion and I wanted to find routes, I suppose, to bring about change for women, in whatever way I could and kind of explore that a little bit through kind of film and video originally. That was a route I was exploring. I also as a feminist activist would become involved in various different campaigns around issues.

One campaign I got involved in, in a sort of ad hoc way initially was around the issue of women who kill their abusive partners, violent partners. And it came about because a friend who lived up in the North had seen a TV program called the Provoked Wife, which featured the cases of several women who’d all been convicted of murder, and were unable to use the then-defense of provocation to argue that their conviction should at the very least be mitigated to manslaughter because of the views they’ve been subjected to, which amounted to provocation.

And yet, the legal system didn’t really, that the legal defense of provocation was really designed much more around a male response to being provoked. So originally, it kind of, you know, originates in, you know, almost like men fighting duels and, you know, kind of responding to an insult. That was the sort of, kind of roots really of the provocation defence, and it required a sudden and temporary loss of control to word said or things done. And that was the test.

And what we saw with these cases was that women who were subjected to abuse and violence over a period were often not able to respond suddenly to a further act of abuse or fear of abuse because they knew if they did they’d come out worse from it.

Anyway, the particular case originally that I got involved with was the case of Sara Thornton, who had killed her husband and been convicted of his murder, and she was appealing his conviction was very keen to get public support to raise the issues. And our friend just asked a group of us if we could get together quickly to organise a demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice to highlight the issue. So we, we kind of called around all our mates and campaigners and stuff and said, look, let’s get down to the Court of Appeal. Let’s make some placards and let’s say, you know, that domestic violence is provocation, self-defense is no offense, these sorts of things, and we all kind of gathered outside the court and we put together some leaflets

highlighting the issue. And transpired that one of the groups that was also really interested in Sara’s case and supporting her case was Southall Black Sisters, and they had been beginning to build up a campaign for another woman called Kiranjit Ahluwalia, who was likewise convicted of the murder of her husband in circumstances where she’d suffer horrific abuse.

And so what happened with Sarah’s case at the Court of Appeal was the Court of Appeal rejected her appeal. And two days later, there was a report in the news of a man who’d kicked his wife to death, and the judge said she would have tried the patience of a saint. And it kind of illustrated everything we had said.

And so we kind of thought it somehow we got the news interested, we captured the public imagination, let us, let’s do some more campaigning around this. And that’s why we formed Justice for Women. We then supported and worked alongside Southall Black Sisters as they built up their huge campaign around Kiranjit Ahluwalia:

ITN, Live Reporting Kiranjit Ahluwalia, Freed. 25 September 1992 8:26

Kiranjit Ahluwalia in the black jacket walked free from the Old Bailey to the jubilant cries of supporters. In 1989 she was convicted of murdering her husband and given a life sentence. Today at her retrial, her plea of manslaughter through diminished responsibility was accepted. Her mental state had been impaired when she set her husband alight with petrol, Mr Justice decided. “I consider justice does not require you to be kept in prison any longer and direct you to be released forthwith,” was what he said. Mrs. Ahluwalia broke down and wept. There were cheers from the public gallery.” Later at a news conference, this reaction… “It’s a great shock for me today. I wasn’t expecting anything. I’m very pleased because finally justice has been done with for me.”

Harriet Wistrich 9:23

And a sort of opportunity, partly arose when after Kiranjit Ahluwalia’s very successful campaign, Justice for Women received a letter from a young woman in prison called Emma Humphreys, who had already been in prison for over seven years, detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, because she was only 17 at the time of her conviction, and was seeking, was now having given up, was now beginning to seek help to appeal.

And she wrote to us, we then went to Kiranjit’s solicitor, Rohit Sangvi, and said would you take this case on? He said yes but I need a volunteer and so I decided to volunteer and I worked with Emma over a number of months to pull together a really detailed statement of her experience, and from that we gradually built up grounds of appeal and during that process, which took you know two or three years.

I decided to do a law conversion course and then the legal practice course to become a Solicitor and the timing was quite good because just literally a few days after I’d finished my legal practice course exams I was outside the court of appeal, inside the court of appeal when Emma successfully succeeded in her appeal and was released from prison so that was my kind of quite exciting entrance into becoming a Solicitor.

Jen Ang 11:00

What an incredible start to your legal career, and then – fast forward through a number of years in private practice, and then you and colleagues founded a legal charity, the Centre for Women’s Justice. What led you to do that?

Harriet Wistrich 11:13

Yes sure so I think the Centre for Women’s Justice I should say is a legal charity which

I kind of founded in 2016 and it’s aims were to hold the state accountable around violence against women and girls and to challenge discrimination in the criminal justice system.

So the reason I decided to establish the charity was that I’d been working after my initial entrance into the legal profession. I’d been working for you know 20 odd years and different legal aid practices but I kind of aside from doing occasional criminal appeals I was really specialising in the kind of fairly niche but growing practice of what was known as actions against the police.

So looking at ways in which you could hold the police accountable for their failures. Now initially a lot of those sorts of cases that were developing were around wrongful arrests, false imprisonment, people being assaulted by the police and malicious prosecution those were the sort of standard types of police actions that were being explored and you know I did a number of those and deaths in custody etc etc.

However because of my pre-existing interest in feminism and my contacts with women’s movement occasionally you know friends or colleagues in the women’s sector would come to me and say is there anything we can do about you know the police just completely failed to investigate this rape case or failed to pull in any protections for this victim of domestic violence who was then murdered whatever those sorts of issues. So it was less about the police over-policing and more about the police under-policing. And we were looking at ways in which we could potentially hold the police accountable for their failures in their duty to protect, to investigate failures of the CPS to prosecute, and apply basically the purpose, you know, if one has any belief in policing, that is for me.

What policing should be doing, it should be protecting the vulnerable, preventing crime or, you know, investigating and properly holding those accountable for committing crimes, and so that was really the area and in fact I then became involved in this case, involving the serial rapist taxi driver John Worboys, One of the problems with the desire to hold police accountable for their failures is that the police are in certainly in English, Welsh law, and I suspect in Scots law as well, I’m not sure, are immune from suit in negligence, so you can’t actually sue the police for negligence failures. You can sue them for, you know, kind of causing harm by over-policing but not necessarily for failure to do things, and there’d been a number of attempts to challenge that. I mean the famous case was around the, another violence against women case around the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, and a case brought by his last victim’s family, Jacqueline Hill, against West Yorkshire police, and the court had held very clearly that the police couldn’t be held liable under our common law in negligence.

So however since that time we had the advent of the Human Rights Act, and the Human Rights Act passed in force in 2000 basically provides, puts a number of duties on the state, which obviously includes the police, to protect its citizens, and so what we were exploring, and you know there were other lawyers sort of looking at different routes around that, could we argue rather than that there was a negligent failure to investigate, that the police failed to comply with their duty to investigate, and that was the case that was eventually evolved and argued around the Worboys case, it was a case called DSD and NBV v the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, and I brought that case on behalf of two women, and interestingly so we did succeed in the High Court and establish that under Article 3 of the European Convention (ECHR), the police do have a duty to conduct an effective investigation into crimes that met the threshold for a violation of Article 3.

And that case amazingly the police kept appealing it and so eventually went up to the Supreme Court. So we’ve now got a very clear duty established because we won all the way up amazingly. I suppose through doing that work and then doing other cases around violence against women, it was clear that there were very few lawyers specialising in the right area who could act for women. There was a huge demand for advice and assistance around these sort of cases. There were a few, one or two other solicitors, I knew but it was a really, really small profession if you like. So we decided– well, I decided I guess that we needed a legal charity, really, to take this case forward.

One of the difficulties also and one of the reasons why I thought that charity was the way forward was because of the very limited availability of legal aid to bring such cases and they’re obviously big, complex cases. So because of the limited availability of legal aid, I thought, you know, if we could set up a charity, there might be other ways in which you could bring challenges around that.

Jen Ang 17:23

That is fascinating, and such a great example of how international human rights law can make a real difference for people in their every day lives – in this case, all those women who have been let down by a police failure to investigate in these troubling cases.

So the Centre was established in 2016 – what do you and your team focus on in the day-to-day?

Harriet Wistrich

A lot of the issues are around that those police and other criminal justice failures to protect, to investigate, to prosecute and to keep safe, I guess. So that’s not exclusively the area of work, but that is particularly of interest. But because also of my interest in terms of, you know, like the women who kill, but more generally, the issue of victims who are criminalised, because the criminal justice system seems incapable of distinguishing between victims and perpetrators quite often. And, you know, like the women who kill, there are many other cases, which we, we do a big project around where women may accused of offending, or maybe convicted of offenses, when really they’re the victim. So that sort of kind of runs alongside the kind of cases where we’re seeking to hold the police and others accountable, yeah.

Jen Ang 18:47

That’s fascinating. Thank you for sharing Harriet. So I’m going to bring us to our final question for the day, which is sort of on behalf of our listeners who might have tuned in to just learn a bit more about using the law, but also what it looks like to be an activist and a lawyer. Now there might be someone out there who is a younger version of you, and who’s looking at what you’ve accomplished today, or maybe just, you know, wants to be you. And my question for you is this, what advice might you have for the younger you?

Harriet Wistrich 19:19

Yeah, I mean, it’s difficult to answer that question without taking into account the very different context that younger me’s live in. So, you know, the area of law that I practice in has been expanded

You know considering not just around violence against women, but around state accountability but you know that there are many you know it’s very very difficult now to get a training contract or you know to qualify in a way that although you know it wasn’t easy it seems to be you know that much harder and now people seem to have to spend quite a bit of time being a paralegal before they can then become a trainee, or there’s the SQE now, but you know it does just seem to take a lot longer and there’s all sorts of other issues that you know in terms of, you know, student debt and various other things that make it quite a different situation.

So kind of transposing my experience from 30 years ago to now may not be exactly the same, but what I would say is that you know, it’s good to do other things before you go into law sometimes. It’s good to be involved, even if you’re studying law straight from the outset just to be involved in other stuff If the reason you’re going into law is because you want to use law as a tool to create change then you should be connected with people who are looking at change – creating change in different ways – and not silo yourself off into being a lawyer.

I’m a very strong believer in you know the benefits of collaborating with others working in other areas and obviously for the sort of work I do and many of you will do, you know, it’s a critical part of that is also obviously to listen to and to work alongside those for whom you’re acting rather than you know to see yourself as some kind of siloed expert really so yeah, I think that that that that’s sort of my kind of philosophy, I don’t think that would change because of the changed times and context whilst I recognize that just being able to spend a few years Just doing kind of volunteering and activism may be more difficult these days

Jen Ang 22:00

Thank you so much Harriet for that wisdom and absolutely, I think that that ethos that you outlined about working alongside and with the people who are raising the issues that you are working on is so important and you’ve clearly expressed that in in your practice.

Harriet Wistrich 22:15

If anyone is interested as well I shamelessly plug my book, it tells people a bit about the story of how I got into law and how I fought those particular battles. So yeah, if you’re really if you are really engaged in these issues, then, you know, you come find out it, a bit about it and what it was, and how I approached it

Jen Ang 22:39

Absolutely. A cracking read and very clear and engaging, just as you are in the podcast today.

Thanks so much to you the listener, for tuning into the Lawmanity podcast.

In our next episode, we’ll be speaking to Andy Sirel, Legal Director at JustRight Scotland, about a legal challenge that secured access to further and higher education for potentially thousands of young people in Scotland. Tune in to hear how an aspiring doctor, and a student-led campaign successfully establish a right to education in human rights law for migrant young people in Scotland and expanded access to further studies for every who follows in their footsteps.

Recorded 28 May 2025

Transcript: LGBT+ Rights in Scotland, with Tim Hopkins

Jen — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Welcome to the Lawmanity podcast, where we explore the complex relationship between law and activism and discuss the different ways that law can oppress people but can also lead to real social change.

I’m Jen Ang, a human rights lawyer and activist based in Scotland and your host on the Lawmanity podcast. Now, every episode will bring you legal summaries of interesting cases and one-to-one interviews with activists across the UK who are using the law in creative ways to challenge unfairness and secure justice for people and communities who are excluded, discriminated against and overlooked.

This week, we’re speaking to activist legend, Tim Hopkins. Dr. Tim Hopkins came to Scotland to pursue his studies in computer sciences but rapidly became a prominent activist in the fight against the notorious Section 28 law, a part of the Local Government Act 1988 that prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality or teaching about it in a positive light in schools.

A prominent and eminent campaigner for LGBT+ rights and equality for all people in Scotland, Tim was also involved in organising Scotland’s first pride march, and headed the National LGBT+ organization Equality Network for 14 years before stepping down in 2024. Tim continues to campaign for LGBT+ rights, including recognition of the rights of trans and non-binary people.

Welcome to the show, Tim, you’ve been such a force of nature, but also part of not just LGBT history, but human rights history in Scotland. I’m really looking forward.

So in this podcast, we start with an opener question just to get a settled and for us to learn a bit more about the legends behind the people we’re interviewing. So a friend pointed out that our sense of smell is our oldest sense, and that we can hold deep connections between the sense of smell and our memories.

So if you don’t mind, can you please tell me about a smell that’s meaningful to you, maybe one that you like or one that’s connected to a time or place that you like to bring to mind?

Tim Hopkins

You’re right, the sense of smell is very evocative, but I’m actually quite boring on this point. I think I might mention two. One is a smell of an ex-boyfriend of mine, mostly the kind of perfume that he used to wear, which, after we split up – we split up after a few years – but that stuck with me for years afterwards. In fact, I used to have, in my cupboard, a jacket that belonged to him, which still smelled of him. I went and looked to see if I still had it before we started and I must have thrown it away at some point over the years.

But actually, before I thought of that, the smell that first came to mind is actually the smell of coffee, because coffee for me is quite important in the morning. Until I’ve had my first coffee, I’m not much use. It’s also connected in my mind to work, I suppose, but not working in an unpleasant sense, but getting things done. That’s a kind of comfortable smell for me.

Jen Ang

Thank you so much for sharing those. And I love the idea of a signature scent that sticks with you, even well beyond the contemporary. And that is so true. There are some people who are just associated with a smell and a time and a place. Must have been a great pick for that person. Must have been the one. And I can totally relate to coffee as well. Thanks so much for sharing those things.

So now we’re going to dive into the simple question about the law and equality. So my question is, do you feel the law works equally for you or for your community, however you choose to define community? And why or why not?

Tim Hopkins

Yes, so I suppose when I thought about this, I was also thinking about the definition of law. There’s kind of two dimensions to that, for the work that I’ve been involved in for a long time. One is what the law itself says, what is in criminal law, what is criminal and what isn’t. In a civil law, what are people’s rights and so on. So that’s one dimension. Then the other dimension is how the law works and you know, being able to uphold your rights and what’s involved in that. To answer the question, when I started campaigning, which was back in the 1980s, the whole environment was that the law treated us very unfairly as LGBT people.

And that’s really what got me involved, so it was all about changing the law.

So in terms of whether the law works for LGBT people: for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, the law is far better now than it was 30 years ago. For trans people, things are really quite different. There have been some improvements: the two key things are the gender recognition system that came in in 2004 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/contents, and the anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws which are now in the Equality Act https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents, which date back to, originally, 1999.

But both those things have been seriously undermined this year, in particular, by the Supreme Court judgment back in April in For Women Scotland versus Scottish Ministers https://supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2024-0042, which is a huge huge problem for trans people. So for trans people, the law is definitely not working at the moment.

Jen Ang

And thank you so much for highlighting those differences. And it must be– I just wanted to sort of ask a follow-on question from that, actually. For you, at the moment, do you see in the contemporary struggles for the rights of trans people and non-binary people any parallels to either the challenges or some of the tactics that were necessary in fighting for the rights for L,G and B people?

Tim Hopkins

Yes, I’ve been saying to people – especially younger people who weren’t around in the 1980s – I’ve been saying recently that it feels like we’re back in the 1980s. The kind of things that happened then, targeting, if you like, lesbian and gay people – or gay men, it was primarily – but the impact was just as bad on lesbian and bisexual people as well. The kind of things that happened then are happening now to trans people.

So one example is Margaret Thatcher famously in the Tory party conference in 1987 had a bit in her speech – it was something like

Margaret Thatcher

“Children who should be being taught traditional moral values are instead being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay.” LGBT+ Marketing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VRRWuryb4k

Tim Hopkins

That’s pretty much a direct quote, and that was a signal – that was in 1987 – and it was a signal that two months later Section 28 was going to be introduced https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/9/pdfs/ukpga_19880009_en.pdf. The first and only time that the law applying to LGB people has gone backwards in the past half a century at least.

And we saw almost the same thing happening a couple of years ago when Rishi Sunak, when he was Prime Minister, in his Tory conference speech, made very similar comments about trans people

Rishi Sunak

“And we shouldn’t be bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t: a man is a man, and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense. [applause]” The Independent, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5kQhhgK6T8

Tim Hopkins

So the whole feel of the way that trans people are being attacked now feels very much like the 1980s. And in just the same way that I mentioned Section 28 being the only time the law had gone backwards, the recent Supreme Court judgment is worse in terms of the harm done to trans rights than Section 28 was for LGB rights. Just as with Section 28 the law has now gone backwards for trans people.

In terms of how we deal with that. Well, moving on kind of into the 1990s there were – in fact, actually in the 1980s as well – there were a number of court cases which helped move things forward. For example, cases, some in the UK courts, some in the European Court of Human Rights, and one at least at the European Court of Justice. And I think court cases are going to be really important.

Work in the media I think is going to be really important. So a lot of work was done in the 1990s to, if you like, normalise same sex relationships to kind of give visibility to LGB people. And I think more work needs to be done to give visibility to trans people, and it’s really positive that trans people are appearing in TV programs like Heartstopper for example, in a similar way to the way that gay men, in particular at first, and then a bit later lesbians, were beginning to appear in the 1980s, in soaps like EastEnders, for example.

And then I think campaigning with politicians to see if it’s possible to get the law changed, which was very slow in the 1990s but gradually picked up speed over the last – certainly between 2000 and 2022 – in Scotland.

And I think one of the important things for LGB rights in Scotland was devolution – that was crucial to moving forward faster a bit faster than down south on some things, and doing it better than down south. And I think there’s an opportunity for doing a similar thing with trans rights as well. Having said that, there is a major problem, which is the reservation of equality law.

And in fact, going right back to 1998 when the Equality Network was only one year old, we did a lot of work campaigning around the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, and we fed into the various bits of consultation that were done about what should the Parliament look like? What should its powers be? And one of the things we said right back then, and we’ve said it many times since, is that equality law should be devolved, like it is in Northern Ireland.

If equality law had been devolved to Scotland, then the court cases, For Women Scotland versus Scottish Ministers – of which there have been two [ https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/media/0a1plqgo/court-of-session-judgement-reclaiming-motion-by-for-women-scotland-limited-against-the-lord-advocate-and-others-18-february-2022.pdf and https://supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2024-0042 ], and the Supreme Court judgement was in the second case – those cases wouldn’t have happened.

Well they certainly wouldn’t have been decided in the way they were, because they were based on Scotland has to comply with whatever equality law means across Britain.

And the blocking of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill [ https://www.parliament.scot/bills-and-laws/bills/s6/gender-recognition-reform-scotland-billhttps://www.parliament.scot/bills-and-laws/bills/s6/gender-recognition-reform-scotland-bill], which was kind of the last one of the positive changes to the law that have happened over the past 25 years in Scotland, that was only blocked because equality law was reserved to Westminster.

Jen Ang

Absolutely. And, yeah, and I suppose we have definitively seen the end point of equality law being reserved to Westminster in this case, a case which originated in Scotland and actually originated in the attempt by Scottish Ministers to exercise the limited powers they had in a reservation.

I am so interested in what you’ve raised, and as a side note, I also was learning today from someone who was there at the time that the Equality Network was, in coalition with other civil society organisations, really crucial in the establishment of the Scottish Human Rights Commission, as well, as an accountability body.

And I feel there is a whole piece – I think it’s not an article. I think it’s probably an entire piece of research – about the specific socio-legal history of human rights and equalities in Scotland, which one day I might come back to you on.

So my next question for you is looking back over the span of your career. Is the law for you a barrier or a tool, or both, in the struggle to achieve greater equality for people and communities who marginalised and disadvantaged?

Tim Hopkins

So I guess for LGBT people, obviously at the beginning when we started this work, the law was a big barrier because there were so many things that were wrong with it.

If you think about what does the law do positively, there was one more act, which is the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) (Scotland) Act 2018 [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2018/14/contents] which we did a lot of work on, which is basically about giving a pardon to every man who was ever convicted. So it’s historical, it’s kind of posthumous pardons to people who are no longer alive, but also gives a pardon to everybody who is still living who has one of these convictions.

So I guess that’s an example of the way in which the law can actually to some extent correct injustices that have happened in the past.

All of that is about removing barriers, but there are also the more positive laws: the Equality Act and the hate crime legislation, which are about protecting people.

Jen Ang

As I hear you describe these things and the long struggle for equality using the law in different ways, it occurs to me that a lot of the work has been about redefining the boundaries of who deserves protection, but also who deserves to be recognised in their identities. So it sounds like the story of the ’80s and the ’90s. And I still remember. I still remember.

There being in the cultural landscape, very severe discrimination and disgust if you like, just around discussions on identity. So the law and the strategic work you did was about bringing people with particular orientations or identities into the fold of people who deserved protection. And it sounds like the work that you’re talking about now looking at trans and non-binary people is a continuation in some ways of that dialogue. What do you think?

Tim Hopkins

No, no, that’s exactly right. So I mentioned the importance of the media. One of the first demonstrations we organised, before the Equality Network was founded, I’d been involved in a number of other groups, and one we set up at the end of 1987, after Margaret Thatcher made her speech I referred to before, and Section 28 had been introduced in Parliament. It hadn’t yet become law. We were doing a lot of campaigning against Section 28.

And one person who got very much involved in the campaign was Michael Cashman, who at that point was an actor – he played a character called Colin on EastEnders, who was a gay man. Colin and Barry were a couple on EastEnders. They were pretty much the first gay male couple to be in any soap opera, really any TV serial in the UK. And then he got involved in campaigning, and then he became a politician, and obviously he’s still involved in campaigning. So those things are really important, which is why it’s really good to see, as I mentioned before, trans people in programmes like Heartstopper, and also the same people speaking out, and their colleagues speaking out.

But yes, you’re absolutely right. The law at the moment is a huge barrier for trans people, especially after the Supreme Court judgment in April. We don’t know quite how bad it’s going to be, but at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very bad indeed. Completely non-compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights, which is why I hope cases will get to the European Court as quickly as possible. But of course, there’s no requirement on the UK government to implement rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. So what happens after that, we have to see, but yes, really the situation of trans people now is I think worse than the situation was for LGB people, even going back to the 1980s. Perhaps the media is not quite so unpleasant as it was about LGB people in the 1980s, but it is almost as bad. But the legal situation, the fact that it looks like trans people are not going to be able to use toilets, is just appalling.

Jen Ang

It’s a concerning prognosis. And one, I’m afraid I might share. But I suppose it’s really helpful in speaking to you because you and other activists who are still of the movement have this longer perspective. It’s really helpful to remind people of some of these challenges we’ve seen before, some of them are new and bigger, but people are still in the movement to lend a hand, as you are, to think about what to do. I’m going to move on or move back, I suppose, to the role of the people who make the legal system happen.

And that is a question about what you think the role of lawyers and the legal system might be in relation to social justice movements?

Tim Hopkins

Okay, so for us, for LGBT people, including trans people, the role of lawyers and the legal system, as in the courts, has been absolutely crucial. That is one of the things that has allowed us to move forward on all of these changes to the law that have happened over the last 25 years. There was actually a case at the end of the 1970s, taken by three gay men in Scotland to what was then, I think, called the European Commission of Human Rights, which was a kind of, I think, that was the first place you went to before you went to the Court. It doesn’t exist anymore, but that was the process back then. And that was basically a case about the fact that sex between men was then completely criminal in all circumstances. Although it had been decriminalised in England in 1967, or partially decriminalised, that hadn’t covered Scotland.

That case actually was withdrawn because Robin Cook introduced an amendment to a bill, under the Thatcher government actually at Westminster, the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill, which became the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_(Scotland)_Act_1980], which basically brought the law in Scotland into line with the law in England. So partial decriminalisation. So that case was withdrawn, but probably the fact that it was there, was one of the things that helped the government agree to Robin Cook’s amendment.

There was a case in the late 90s where four people who had been members of the armed forces, and were thrown out at the armed forces for being lesbian or gay, because in those days, if you were lesbian or gay, you couldn’t be a member of the armed forces. It’s normally called Smith and Grady [https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-58408%22]}], although there were four of them. I can’t remember whether their case was completed. I think it was. I think they won the case in the European Court of Human Rights. That meant that the law was changed under the Blair Government in around 1999-2000.

And around the same time there were cases, well in fact there was a case in the early 1990s, somebody that I knew here in Scotland who was a student called Hugo Greenhalgh, took a case with his boyfriend, Will Parry, supported by Stonewall, to the European Court of Human Rights https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-2013%22]}], because they were under 21, and the age of consent then, because decriminalisation had only been partial, the age of consent between men was 21. It never got to judgment, if I remember rightly, because the Major government allowed an amendment to be debated, which became part of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. The amendment was led by Tony Blair [and Edwina Currie MP] to equalize the age of consent at 16. It didn’t succeed, but the age was reduced to 18, and those two men were over 18, so their case kind of disappeared.

But Stonewall then supported another case, for somebody who at the time had been, a few years before, 16, and so his case was about the fact that he’d been criminalized for being 16. Euan Sutherland, his name was, and that went to the European Commission of Human Rights, who ruled in his favour [https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-45912%22]}], and that was one of the reasons why, in 2000, the Blair government introduced the, I think it was, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act, which equalised the age of consent for sex between men at 16.

So, those are all examples of the European Court of Human Rights, and there’s one more really important one, and that is Goodwin versus the UK [https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-60596%22]}], which is the one about gender recognition, and relates to the Gender Recognition Act in 2004. And that’s an interesting one, because it was something like the third separate case about gender recognition that had gone to the European Court of Human Rights, and the first two cases had been lost, but the Court takes into account the context across the Council of Europe, and by the time it got to 2002, the majority of Council of Europe countries had some sort of gender recognition; the UK was pretty much an outlier through not having gender recognition.

And so the Court said, yeah, well, previously, we’ve said it’s not a requirement to have a gender recognition system, but now, 2002, we’re saying it is a requirement. And that then led to the Gender Recognition Act.

So those are all European court cases. There was another really important one at the European Court of Justice, which of course we can’t go to now, thanks to Brexit. P vs S and Cornwall County Council [ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:61994CJ0013 ], which was a trans-related case about discrimination, where the European Court of Justice ruled that discriminating against somebody because they were trans was a kind of sex discrimination, and that led to regulations to amend the Sex Discrimination Act, in 1999, to protect from discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment, at least in employment. Then that was extended later to cover goods and services as well.

So those are all European court cases. There have been some domestic cases, which have been important as well, for getting the law changed. The most significant one that I can remember was called Ghaidan vs Godin-Mendoza [https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldjudgmt/jd040621/gha-1.htm] and it was decided initially in 2002. It was about tenancy succession, so Mendoza was a man who had been in a same sex relationship and his partner had died, and his partner had been the tenant for a flat. I think it had been housing association, it might have been local authority housing. And had they been a mixed sex couple, then the surviving partner would automatically have inherited the tenancy. But he was told he had to leave the flat because the same sex partnership wasn’t recognised. This is before civil partnership existed, but had they been unmarried mixed sex couple, then the surviving partner would have inherited the tenancy. So he went to court and said this is discrimination against me because I was in a same sex couple. The court in this country ruled in his favour and said yes, it is discrimination to not allow a cohabiting same sex couple to inherit a tenancy in that way. And that was one of the things that helped ensure that the Civil Partnership Act happened a couple of years later, because I think the government wanted to regularise the law around same sex partnerships.

So that’s not my complete list, but that’s a list of some of the really important cases. In some cases the law has been changed directly, certainly Ghaidan versus Mendoza – I think that had direct effect – but in the majority of cases it’s been about a European Court of Human Rights case, or something that’s happened in this country, which has then provided a big impetus to actually getting the law changed through legislation.

Jen Ang

Wow, that was an incredible walk through Tim. And I feel like your list of cases would be such an interesting semester course for law students or for activists, or maybe even a reading group. I just think that we sometimes don’t stop and look back, again, at the strategies, but also the circumstances that were in play at the time that change had to happen. And it’d be great to remember that now.

So my next question is one of my very favorites, because it invites you to imagine how things could be different. And it’s, what does justice look like for you or for your community, again, however you define community?

Tim Hopkins

Yes, I think it’s a really good question. First of all, in terms of even the LGB community, where the things we’ve been talking about have got a lot further than for trans people, really, I would have to say justice is impossible for anybody over the age of about 20. And the reason I say that is that everybody over that age would have been through an education system in Scotland, where LGB people were discriminated against in the sense that nothing positive was ever said about same-sex relationships or about LGB people. There was no visibility for LGB people, and that will have added to the difficulties that young teenage LGB people have dealing with the fact that they’re discovering their sexual orientation. It has changed in just the last few years, quite a lot, thanks to the work of the Time for Inclusive Education campaign in Scotland [https://tie.scot] and also LGBT Youth Scotland [https://lgbtyouth.org.uk], and some others. So it’s got quite a lot better. But I think if you’re in your 20s or older, and it gets worse the older you are, because of the history of these changes, then I think, really, justice is not possible because those things have had an effect on you, and that effect can’t be undone. This is why the way young people are supported is so important to me.

For trans people that is still happening, so for any person who’s a trans person, now the situation for young trans people in particular is getting worse and worse, with the ban on puberty blockers, and all the nonsense from this Cass review thing https://transactual.org.uk/advocacy/critiques-of-the-cass-review/], which is a completely unscientific biased review, which has been debunked by peer-reviewed scientific studies in a number of other countries, but which has had a huge negative impact on young trans people’s lives.

I think those things stay with you for the rest of your life in some sense, so complete justice is not possible. Having said that – that sounds very negative – in terms of just laws, we have come a huge way, as we have been discussing, over the past 25-30 years.

So, I personally feel now I live in a country where, for somebody who’s gay, we are much closer to a just system than we’ve ever been before, and I feel kind of quite comfortable about “official Scotland,” if you like, the law in Scotland, what it says about me as a gay man seems to be pretty fair now.

So I guess on that measure of justice, we’ve kind of got there for LGB people. There are other measures as well, and there’s still a lot of hate crime going on, there’s still a lot of discrimination going on, but at least in terms of the law, the law is there to try to deal with those things. As I’ve said several times, for trans people, things are a lot further back.

Jen Ang

I think that’s, as always, with you, Tim, articulate and fair criticism of both the position we’re in. And also the places where we really need to think about scope for action, particularly what it looks like growing up as a young LGBT person.

And I guess that nicely leads me on to my last question, which is about young people out there. So there will be people out there listening who are maybe aspiring activists or aspiring lawyers, I suppose. And they will be looking at everything that you’ve done, which I know you won’t admit this, but standing back is quite an impressive record. And they might be a younger version of you or someone who wants to be you one day.

And so my question is, what advice do you have for someone like that about what it takes or what they should focus on? Yeah, to be the well-balanced thoughtful, and still in some ways, optimistic person that you are today?

Tim Hopkins

So I suppose I think I’ve been very lucky to be involved in this at kind of just the right time, certainly in terms of LGB equality. Because when I got involved, although things had just gone backwards, or were just about to go backwards, because I got involved at the beginning of 1987, just before Section 28. From then onwards, things started moving forwards, very slowly at first, but faster and faster.

So I consider myself to have been very fortunate to have been involved in it during that very positive time. But I think the same will be true of trans equality in particular going forward, and I think there are big areas where LGB equality can still be improved – we were talking about young people and so on. So I think there’s big opportunities there for making a difference. What would my advice be?

So I guess I’m quite lucky in that I don’t get too angry about things. I think if you do get very angry about these things, which is very easy to do, because these injustices are so stark and obvious, then I think that can make it harder to effectively campaign – it depends what kind of campaigning you’re involved in on the day, if you like. Because there’s nothing wrong, in fact, it’s positive, to express your anger on a march, for example, or that kind of thing, which we’ve done a fair bit of in the past.

But when it comes to sitting down and trying to figure out how the law is going to be changed, and sitting down and talking to politicians and so on, it’s OK to express the fact that the law, whatever it is, or discrimination, is making you angry, but you have to somehow do that without letting the anger control what you’re saying, and the way you’re expressing it. So I guess trying to be laid back is quite an important thing.

What else? Well, I mean, different people have different approaches to these things, and I’m somebody, before I got involved in this, I worked in computing. So I’m somebody who’s very detail oriented, and it’s important to have detail oriented people in this campaign because it’s important to be able to make detailed arguments and to quickly spot if something’s going in the wrong direction, whether it’s an amendment to a bill that has been introduced, or something that a court has said. So not everybody has to be detail oriented but it’s important to have detail oriented people.

But it’s also important to look after yourself and to have a group of people who look after each other. That’s absolutely crucial. I’ve been lucky – I’ve talked quite a bit about myself in this last part – but actually the Equality Network has always been a whole group of people working together, and that kind of support – even before we had any funding, we used to meet weekly to take the campaign forward. Only about half a dozen people, but that kind of support, mutual support between people, that we were able to give each other doing that every week was really, really important as well.

Jen Ang

Thank you for that advice.

And just sort of honest reflection about the things that get you through, but also a reminder that campaigns are many hands at work with their many different skills. The detailed oriented people and also the bold dreamers, I suppose, is another. And sometimes you can be both.

I mean, listen, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking to you.

Tim Hopkins

Well thank you very much for asking me to do this. I suppose if there’s kind of one thing that I haven’t said, it’s because I’ve been focused on LGBT equality is that you have to see these things in a wider context and certainly, although there are still issues for LGBT people, the injustices in this country are not really around LGBT people, they are around poverty, they are around people who don’t have jobs, they are around people not being able to access health services properly and so on.

So I don’t want to give the impression that I think that justice is just about justice for LGBT people, because the Equality Network has always worked with people from other equality strands but also other human rights defenders. And issues of poverty affect LGBT people as well, especially trans people. But obviously most LGB people including myself are fortunate enough to have enough money to live reasonably comfortably, but there are a whole load of people, LGBT and many many many others, who don’t, and that is one of the biggest injustices facing the country.

Jen Ang

I absolutely agree. And one of the things that I have really enjoyed about working in Scotland with people from across different equality groups, I suppose, and something that’s different to my experience working elsewhere is that recognition – that recognition between activists and advocates, that these issues are all intertwined and that, you know, destitution and homelessness as well as discrimination against someone who isn’t like you, is very much as as much a concern for you as it is about discrimination against you for who you are.

So actually, I love that you brought that back. And I think that sense is alive in the work that we do. It may not always be visible to the public or to people externally, but that’s an important piece of the work for sure.

Recorded 10 July 2025

Transcript: Challenging the UK Govt’s Rwanda Policy, with Alison Pickup

Jen — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Host: Jen Ang

Alison Pickup

“And I think for the clients that one of the hardest things about that initial attempt to remove was that they had, as I say, mostly literally just arrived in the country after a very traumatic and a distressing journey, and they were given so little time that even to sort of get their heads around the idea of being sent to Rwanda..”

Carla Denyer MP

“Nobody is choosing to cross the channel on small boats because they think it will be a laugh. They’re doing it in desperation.”

Jen Ang

Welcome to the Lawmanity Podcast, where we explore the complex relationship between law and activism and discuss the different ways that law can oppress people but can also lead to real social change.

I’m Jen Ang, a human rights lawyer based in Scotland, and your host on the Lawmanity Podcast. Every episode we will bring you legal summaries of interesting cases and one-to-one interviews with activists and lawyers across the UK who are using the law in creative ways to challenge unfairness and secure justice for people and communities who are excluded, discriminated against and overlooked.

This week we’re speaking to human rights lawyer and legend, Alison Pickup.

Alison is a barrister and Executive Director of Asylum Aid where she leads an expert team providing legal representation to asylum seekers and refugees. Before joining Asylum Aid, she was Legal Director of the Public Law Project. a national legal charity which promotes access to public law remedies for those who are disadvantaged by poverty and other barriers.

Alison has won multiple awards for her work, including Outstanding Employed Barrister in an NGO Award by the Bar Council. And, in August 2025, Alison will be taking up the post of CEO at the Helen Bamber Foundation Group, a pioneering group of human rights charities which includes the Helen Bamber Foundation, Asylum Aid and the Migrants Law Project. Together the group supports survivors of trafficking, torture and other forms of human cruelty.

Congratulations on the new role Alison and welcome to today’s show!

Alison Pickup

Thank you.

Jen Ang

I’m so, so pleased that you’re here and I’ll be honest, you’re a total legal hero of mine, so I’m really grateful that you’ve taken the time to speak to us today as well.

Alison Pickup

That was very kind.

Jen Ang

Now, in this podcast as a starter, I’ve been experimenting with a surprise opening question just to get us settled and to learn a little more about the people behind the legal legends who we’re interviewing. So a good friend of mine pointed out that our sense of smell is our oldest sense and observed that sometimes we can hold deep connections between the sense of smell and our memories.

And so if you don’t mind, please can you tell me if there is a smell that is meaningful to you or maybe one that you just really like, or that might be connected to a time and place that you like to bring to mind?

Alison Pickup

Yeah, sure. That’s a lovely question. I don’t exactly know what the smell is, but it’s like a combination of essential oils, I think, that takes me back to a trip I made to Bangkok about ten years ago, and a friend and I were travelling, we’d been staying in fairly cheap accommodation, but in Bangkok, we’d treated ourselves to a couple of nights of slightly nicer accommodation in a hotel … …the whole hotel, just smelled beautiful. And every time I smell that combination, it takes me back to that place.

And then a couple of years ago, a cousin of mine had these bath salts that she was using that had the same smell. So I went out and bought those bath salts, and I can take myself back to that amazing holiday to Thailand whenever I’m feeling stressed.

So it’s the Women’s Balance bath salts from Neal’s Yard Remedies, I think.

Jen Ang

That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that and big up Neal’s Yard as well!

So we’re here today to help listeners understand how you and your team at Asylum Aid led a successful campaign to challenge the Conservative-led UK Government’s Rwanda policy, and took a series of groundbreaking legal cases – starting in 2022 – that went all the way to the UK Supreme Court.

This is especially timely, as this year, in 2025, the UK Labour Government prepares to repeal the Safety of Rwanda Act in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, currently before Parliament.

And so to start with, can I just ask you to explain to us how you got involved with this legal case and this campaign and what it was about?

Alison Pickup

So I had been, I joined Asylum Aid in late 2021, so I’d been there just under six months when the government announced its plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. And at the time we were already thinking about the need for a strategic legal working response to the legislation that was going through Parliament, the Nationality, Asylum and Borders Bill, which included plans for offshoring.

But that legislation hadn’t even finished its passage through Parliament, when out of the blue, the government just announced this agreement with Rwanda under which anybody pretty much seeking asylum in the UK who had come through a dangerous route – which, you know, that’s basically the only way to get to the UK to seek asylum – could be sent to Rwanda. And the plan was that this was to be a deterrent to stop other people from using dangerous routes to come here, including crossing the Channel in small boats.

Jen Ang

Here Alison mentions that she and her colleagues were concerned about a new draft law that included plans for “offshoring.” “Offshoring” is a practice where states send people away to some other country or territory for “offshore processing” of their asylum claim. This is a controversial practice and the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) have described the UK Rwanda Plan as “incompatible with the letter and spirit of the Refugee Convention.”

Alison continues:

I was really shocked when I first heard about this because I knew that Rwanda didn’t have a great human rights record, wasn’t known for protecting refugees, and also that it’s thousands of miles away. And for our clients who had, you know, often paid a lot of money, spent a lot of time, gone through a lot of hardship to reach what they saw as a safe country in the UK – the idea that they would then be shipped off thousands of miles to another country where I didn’t feel they would be safe was just horrifying.

And so I mean I remember it really clearly the announcement and the days that followed even kind of lying awake worrying about how we could stop this scheme from happening.

I think it was really clear from the start that it was going to take litigation because the government had announced this as a flagship policy that was the key part of its asylum policy – it’s plan to “stop the boats” as that government called it, and so given the size of the majority that the government had in Parliament, it seemed extremely unlikely that there would be any other way to stop it.

And also because they implemented it in a way that didn’t actually require any new legislation – although the Nationality and Borders Bill had those provisions – so they could they could get on with it straight away.

So that really was kind of where it started and where it became immediately clear that we would need to be thinking about litigation.

The other thing I think is that we were very aware that everyone in the refugee sector was kind of thinking and feeling the same, like: “we need to do something about this.”

Jen Ang

I found it particularly interesting how certain it was for you and your legal team that litigation was the way that that we could use the law in order to challenge this policy – because it was such an important policy for the UK government at the time, it felt like the sphere for policy and influencing was really small – if not, nonexistent.

And the other thing I wanted to reflect was that, you know, because I was also in practice and working in the migration sector at the time that you did this work, I think also seeing your team take these legal challenges did also have like a buoying, or hopeful, impact for people who were doing their day to day work.

So my next question for you was this and what were some of the challenges and as you saw it in running the legal case or maybe in coordinating your efforts with the campaign?

Alison Pickup

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think coordination was tricky. As I said, obviously, so many actors in the sector were trying to find ways to challenge. And so a key part at the start was kind of reaching out to those other organisations and to lawyers in private practice as well, who were acting on behalf of individual clients and on behalf of other NGOs and trying to understand what everyone else was doing and where we could add value.

So I think that was, it was a challenge, but actually it, I think it was a start of a lot more proactive collaboration in the sector, that we were – the way we had to pull together.

The second and related kind of biggest challenge was the speed at which things started to happen, because the announcement was like mid-April and it was in early May when the Government started detaining people on arrival and threatening them with removal to Rwanda, and we started to see how the process was playing out. And the first removals were due to take place in kind of mid-June.

So it was only really two months from even hearing for the first time that this was a possibility, to when people were supposed to be put on planes. So everything had to be done at kind of breakneck speed, on behalf of individual clients and then Asylum Aid was kind of running our own challenge, which focused on procedural fairness.

And that was really challenging, and then you remember, I’m sure, that in the first instance, the High Court and then the Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court in the UK all refused injunctions to prevent people being removed to Rwanda.

And I remember the day, the flight was supposed to take off, you know, we were getting updates about what was going on in the Supreme Court, individual clients were still going to the High Court and having the individual cases heard and they might have been refused injunctions – although some were granted. And then Strasbourg kind of stepped in and said there’s a real need for this to be considered properly, so no one should be removed until the domestic courts have done so. So speed was a massive challenge, and the pace of the pace at which everything was happening.

Jen Ang

Here Alison shares her recollection of the legal challenge to the UK Government’s first scheduled flight to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda, which took place on 13-14 June 2022. From the start of June, the UK Government had sent removal directions to a number of asylum seekers – each of whom raised individual challenges to their removal directions in the High Court by way of judicial review. Many of those who raised judicial reviews had their removal directions cancelled, either by the Home Office or after their case had been scrutinized by the court.

But some of those remaining applied for injunctions – an order that a court can issue to stop – or “enjoin” – the removal until such time as the court could examine the substance of the claim that the decision to remove was unlawful. These requests for injunctions we refused by the High Court, and on appeal, by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.

On 13 June 2022, the day before the flight was due to depart, some of those remaining made applications to the European Court of Human Rights – which Alison refers to here as “Strasbourg,” because it sits in Straus bourg France, under its Rule 39 interim measures provision. A Rule 39 interim measure is a power of the European Court to require parties to take an urgent measure – for example to stop a removal flight – where there is “an imminent risk of irreparable harm to a right under the European Convention on Human Rights.” The European Court decided that an interim measure was necessary here, and the decision in one of these cases – NSK v United Kingdom was confirmed by press release on the evening of 14 June 2022 and this led to the Home Office cancelling the flight very shortly before its scheduled departure.

Alison continues:

And even after the Strasbourg Court issued a Rule 39 measure and the kind of final few people were literally taken off the plane, the Court and the Home Office were still pushing the case through at a very fast pace. They originally wanted to have the final hearing at the end of July, which just wasn’t, it was too quick. So it ended up being in September and October of that year, even that was a very fast pace for the, for the complex view of the issues that all of the legal teams have to get their heads around, get on top of, the number of different parties involved, the coordination that was required, those six months were incredibly intense and fast-paced. Yeah,

Jen Ang

I can actually almost like …feel, feel the tension as you describe it.

But also I mean, it must have been, it must have been such a power of work, but also because you and your team were working across so many things, so quickly it must have felt like it went quickly as well. Do you know like in a blur almost?

Okay, so just to make sure that our listeners understand, what was the change in the law that ultimately your litigation across the cases is secured?

Alison Pickup

Yeah so I think there are kind of three parts to the answer to all of those questions.

The first: in the first round of litigation which was from sort of mid 2022 to the end of 2023, the fundamental issue that was being argued in the courts was that Rwanda was not a safe place to send people seeking asylum and refugees. Asylum Aid wasn’t spearheading that particular argument – other people were running that argument on behalf of individual clients. Our focus was on the process that was being used by the Home Office to decide who to send to Rwanda, whether it was safe to do so, which was incredibly fast. So people were given just seven days to respond to a notice of intent to send them to Rwanda when they had literally just arrived in the country, often hadn’t had access to legal advice.

I think the change in the law that our focus on that process and the lack of fairness in that process achieved – although our case was ultimately unsuccessful – was really clear guidance from the Court of Appeal about the requirements for a fair process in this context, including the need for access to legal representation and the need for proper time to understand what is being proposed to gather evidence and make submissions and respond to that, and to secure access to justice.

So that important change was subsequently reflected in guidance when the Home Office had another go at sending people to Rwanda, but it will apply to any similar scheme that might come in the future. So I think it’s an important change for the future.

And I think for the clients that one of the hardest things about that initial attempt to remove was that they had, as I say, mostly literally just arrived in the country after a very traumatic and a distressing journey, and they were given so little time that even to sort of get their heads around the idea of being sent to Rwanda. So what this will do is mean that they should have proper time to get legal representation and advice to understand what is happening and to put forward their case against it.

The second sort of part, I think, is that a lot of people ended up in that kind of limbo, because during the litigation, the Home Office continued at the start to issue these notices of intent threatening to send people to Rwanda, but no one was actually being removed.

And so people spent, in some cases, a couple of years being told they might be sent to Rwanda, but not actually having anything happen in their cases. And we brought litigation in 2024, on behalf of a number of clients challenging those individual notices, and at those cases eventually settled, but I think that whole round of litigation helped to establish that you can’t just leave people in limbo for no reason in the hope that you might one day be able to remove them to a third country. And that is also really important, because that limbo had a really big impact on people really unable to get on with their lives.

And then the third is obviously after the December 2023 Supreme Court judgment, which ruled that Rwanda was not a safe country to send people seeking asylum to.

Lord Reid, UK Supreme Court

The legal test, which has to be applied in this case, is whether there are substantial grounds for believing that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda would be at real risk of refoulement. In the light of the evidence which I have summarised, the Court of Appeal concluded that there were such grounds. We are unanimously of the view that they were entitled to reach that conclusion.

Jen Ang

And that was Lord Reed of the UK Supreme Court reading out the November 2023 judgment in the case just described by Alison, in which the Court finally ruled that Rwanda was not a safe country to return people to, an epic win for campaigners and long awaited for relief for the people they served.

Lord Reed refers to the “principle of non-refoulement” which is a guiding principle in international law which prohibits states from returning a person to a place where they would face a real risk of persecution, torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment. In coming to this decision, the UK Supreme Court found that people seeking asylum expelled to Rwanda from the UK would be at a real risk of return, in violation of both international and UK law.

I then asked Alison: “After the Supreme Court found that Rwanda was not a safe place to return asylum seekers to, what the Government’s response to that ruling was?”

Alison Pickup

The government then introduced legislation in Parliament in the Safety of Rwanda Act, which legislated to say that yes, Rwanda is a safe place, and to try to create a framework which would allow the Home Office to go ahead and remove people to Rwanda without effective scrutiny by the courts, because Parliament had said that Rwanda was safe.

And so Asylum Aid again kind of challenged that – both in our own name, but we also worked across the sector to make sure that any individuals who were affected had the arguments and could bring challenges too.

And that challenge was ongoing when the [UK] General Election was called. I think as a result of that challenge, no one was removed to Rwanda before the election, and obviously then after the election and new government abandoned the plan and committed to Asylum Aid in settling the claim, they would repeal the Safety of Rwanda Act.

That second attempt, they started detaining people in May or June last year for removal to Rwanda, causing a huge amount of stress again to people, and we saw real harm done to people through that action. And I think there was something particularly cruel about the Rwanda scheme in the deterrent purpose because the Home Office was trying to use individual asylum seekers who come here seeking protection, punishing them to deter others,

But I also believe that and you know what you said earlier about how it buoyed up other colleagues and I saw that internally as well. I also think for clients, I hope, that them knowing that somebody was standing up and fighting this policy helped people to survive that really difficult period as well.

And then ultimately of course the policy has been abandoned and they’re not being threatened with removal to Rwanda at least, now.

Jen Ang

The Rwanda policy was so cruel and unusually I feel like the cruelty of it did cut through into mainstream media and conversations that you would have with people.

But I also, you got the sense that people were almost incredulous and that this was the [UK] government’s policy and yet many people believed that if the government had a policy it must be lawful.

And I think one of the things that your litigation brought to light was that there is space to challenge policies that can be unlawful. And that also allowed people to talk about it in the public space in that way.

Humza Yousaf MSP, First Minister of Scotland

That we’ve seen this morning of those who’ve lost their life trying to cross the channel – it’s a reminder that what you need is not unworkable legislation like the Rwanda Bill. What you need to do is to create safe, legal routes for migration, and that hopefully deters the illegal migration that none of us, anybody of any political party, wants to see.

Carla Denyer MP

Nobody is choosing to cross the channel on small boats because they think it will be a laugh. They’re doing it in desperation.

We do need to see the government abandoning this idea with warehousing migrants on barges. That’s clearly inhumane as is deporting them rather than simply assessing their asylum applications quickly. So they’re not having to sit around waiting.

Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, UK House of Lords

We are faced with a deeply broken system and layers of bad legislation which have only made things worse. I hope that the Government re-thinks this bill, this plan and this approach to migration, but I fear that we will be left without the change we need until we change the Government.

Lord German, UK House of Lords

Clause 1(2)(b) ) is clear. It says, “This act gives effect to the judgment of Parliament that the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country.” But my Lords, this House of Parliament has not determined that this is the case.

Jen Ang

Just moving on, we’re a few years on,… Do you think the change in the law that you’ve seen, do you think that litigation has had the impact you hoped for?

Alison Pickup

Yeah, thank you. So yes and no, is answer. Did it have the impact we wanted it to? The Rwanda scheme is dead. Like that was the that was the main objective and the main goal. And so that, you know, not just Asylum Aid, but all of the other people who were involved in the litigation and the campaigns, it was really a whole huge partnership across the sector.

I also, as I mentioned, I think the findings that the Court of Appeal made in our case about what procedural fairness requires in this context, that was a real win, although they dismissed our case because they said that Home Office could change the policy and then it would be lawful. So it wasn’t inherently unfair. Those findings are going to be really important. Whatever scheme or plan a government may come up with for processing asylum claims, we have really clear statements from the Court of Appeal about the importance of access to legal representation. I think, a clear finding that seven days is in the majority of cases obviously not enough time to prepare a case is a really important finding going forward.

What still needs to change, you know, this government hasn’t abandoned the idea of inadmissibility. So the idea that you can say to someone who comes here and claims protection and says I am a refugee. Oh, we’re not even going to consider whether you’re a refugee. We’re going to send you to another country to consider that, that kind of shirking of responsibility under the Refugee Convention. That is still a policy of this government.

Asylum Aid really strongly believes in the right to territorial of the asylum. If you arrive in the UK, you should have your asylum claim considered and processed here. So that is another change we would like to see.

And also, I think the strength of the findings from the Supreme Court on what is required for a country to be truly safe as a third country.

The other piece that’s still in the background is although the Border, Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill is repealing most of the Illegal Migration Act. There are some parts of it that are being left on the statute books and that includes Section 59, which hasn’t been brought into force yet. So Section 59 of the Illegal Migration Act, which basically extends the number of the countries from which asylum claims are just automatically inadmissible, beyond EU countries, to countries including India, Georgia and Albania, from which we know that there are people who are refugees. There are people who are survivors of trafficking and at risk of retrafficking. There are, you know, in the Indian and Georgian context, LGBTQ people who are refugees, and if that provision is brought into force, it will prevent those people from having their claims considered at all, and that really worries me that that’s staying.

Jen Ang

Brilliant. Thank you very much for that really clear summary. And I think that actually if you look back, that is a list of accomplishments to be proud of for you and your team. And but also exactly like the clear-sighted lawyer that you are. I appreciate that you have in your sights a number of other areas in which things need to change for people seeking asylum and safety from persecution to actually have the justice and the fair process that they deserve.

So that just leads us on to our final question, and it’s this:

So what advice might you have for someone who’s listening out there who might be a younger version of you, wants to be you when they grow up, who is looking at what you’ve accomplished today leading more than one public interest litigation team. And wants to know how to get there. What advice would you give them, now?

Alison Pickup

I think my number one piece of advice is: don’t hurry.

Like I think when you’re young and enthusiastic, you can be very impatient to get on with your career and with achieving big things, but there’s plenty of time and what’s important is to really take time to know what you enjoy, what motivates you, where your skills are, and focus on that area.

So for me, it was a very gradual path. You know, I started as a caseworker and realised that I really enjoyed being an advocate in court. And so I ended up qualifying as a barrister. And then, you know, after having practiced for kind of nearly ten years, I then decided I wanted to move more into the NGO world. And so, I just think don’t hurry and take your time and learn what’s good.

And the other one I would say is colleagues, partnership network, is really important.

You know, this work can be really challenging emotionally, as well as stressful, it can be very tiring. You can’t do it alone and you need to build that network in, you know, in your workplace with colleagues in the sector, with people who don’t work in this world at all, in order to have like really good support around you and people who understand what drives you, who are there for you when things get tough, is really important.

Jen Ang

Amazing. Thank you for that outstanding advice.

So I’m really pleased that you and your team are still on it and I look forward to what you get up to next. But for today, thank you for your generous time and for, and for answering our questions.

Alison Pickup

Thank you so much. It was always a pleasure to talk, Jen.

Jen Ang

And finally, thanks so much to you, the listener, for tuning into the Lawmanity podcast, and the first in our series highlighting the inspiring cases taken by activist lawyers across the UK.

If you loved this podcast, please do hit the subscribe button, and also like and share our episodes with friends and colleagues who might enjoy learning a little bit about how the law really works in practice, and how it can be used to make the world a better, brighter place.

Our first series of this podcast has been generously supported by a grant from the Clark Foundation for Legal Education.

The Lawmanity podcast is co-produced by me, your host, Jen Ang, and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe. And the music you’ve been listening to is “Always on the Move” by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow-based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.

Recorded 21 May 2025

Safety, belonging and why legal recognition of identity matters

Jen — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

This morning, the Long View only has only thing on her mind, and that is: the UK Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers.

For those of you who don’t follow legal matters or trans justice issues so closely, a brief explainer:

On Wednesday, the UK Supreme Court delivered a judgement in a case brought by a group of Scottish women against the Scottish government, in which the court determined that the definition of “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 means, exclusively, “biological woman” and “biological sex”.

For Women Scotland supporters, celebrating “large gametes” and the “immutability” of sex I Photo credit: For Women Scotland website

Why does this matter?

It matters because previously, the common legal and public understanding of the definition of “woman” – both in the relevant part of the Equality Act and in wider laws designed to promote equality and protect women from harm – was based in a gendered understanding of what it is to be a woman.

The majority of women’s organisations globally – including UN Women – adopt a gendered approach (and not a biological approach) to their work because decades of research, policy and activism have shown that a gendered approach moves us closer to the kind of equality we want to see in the world, for both genders.

What do you mean by “gender”?

Let’s try this thought experiment. Picture a young person in your life, a child or a teenager or even a young adult. Now bring to mind the things that worry you about the future of that young person – the things you want to guide them through, the things you want to protect them from.

Some of those fears will be gender-neutral – you might hope that they find a greater sense of confidence in themselves, that they learn to make and keep good friends, that one day, they find a loving partner.

But some of those things will be very gendered.

Gullane Beach, East Lothian, Scotland

Can you give an example?

Sure.

For example, girls are (still) raised in Scotland with a social expectation that they will strive to be agreeable, cheerful and polite, attractive to males and suitable for holding caring and homemaking roles in their future families.

Boys are (still) raised in Scotland with the expectation that they will be bold, successful and strong, attractive to females and suitable for maintaining careers that will financially support their future families.

And gender norms – like many other types of norms – are not neutral because they exist in societies where power is unevenly distributed.

The further you step away from expected gender norms, the greater a risk of ridicule, humiliation, exclusion and harm you will face.

We know plenty of people – most of you who are reading this article, probably – who are living out roles in your work and family life which are much less binary than what I have just described above.

But have a think about the young people in your life, and what they are navigating in school today: girls who choose not to look “pretty” and feminine will be ridiculed and humiliated by fellow students (and possibly, also teachers) – and so too will boys who choose not to appear “strong” and masculine.

And because our young people are literally our future, in 2025, we cannot deny that gender norms continue to play a powerful role in society and are an important part of determining how equal our future world can be.

Photo credit: Pexels I Alexander Grey

Legal frameworks that protect us against sex discrimination, actually protect us against gender discrimination

Our legal frameworks which were designed to protect people against sex discrimination – such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964 (in the US) and the Equality Act 2010 (in the UK) – have largely been used to tackle discrimination on the grounds of gender.

Famously, one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s most significant sex discrimination cases was taken not on behalf of a woman, but on behalf of a man, who was unfairly denied a tax break because he was a single unmarried man caring for his 89-year-old mother (and not a single unmarried woman). The law discriminated against him because he and his mother were not conforming to a gender norm – one in which unmarried women and not men cared for their elderly parents. In this case, RBG managed to prove that this discrimination was unlawful – as immortalised in the film based on this true story: On the Basis of Sex.

Therefore, I return to my previous point: until Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling, the common legal and public understanding of sex discrimination was that we were talking about gender, and not (sorry, I do have to say this) genitals.

So why is this a case about trans rights, and not women’s rights?

Such a great question. The Long View has history on the For Women Scotland (FWS) case because JustRight Scotland supported the charity Scottish Trans in 2020 to intervene in the predecessor to this Supreme Court case.

FWS had challenged the Scottish Government’s decision to include trans women in the definition of “women” when selecting people to sit on Scottish public boards.

Yes, the Supreme Court case turns on something both as mundane and as significant as this: the FWS case is about whether or not, in meeting its own goal to have women make up at least 50% of people sitting on public boards – like Historic Environment Scotland and NHS Highlands – Scottish government agencies can include trans women in that tally.

This was a Scottish Government initiative, probably aimed at exercising a new power (to set a minimum quota for women on public boards) in an inclusive and thoughtful way.

No one asked me, so I’m allowed to speculate, but I’m guessing the reasoning was: if the goal of having diverse representation on public boards is to make sure that people with a wide range of experiences are part of the governance structures that keep our public services accountable, trans women have wisdom and insight to contribute about what it is like living as a woman in Scotland and interacting with public services, that should be welcomed.

Given the very modest number of trans women living in Scotland, and the smaller number still of women in Scotland who might consider applying for a role on a public board, the actual number of people affected was … also very modest.

Now. If that’s all this case was about, why would you challenge this decision?

More importantly, why in the wake of challenging this decision are people talking not about the women on Scottish public boards – but about the many other public places where trans people might face exclusion, lawful or otherwise, in the immediate future?

In short, exclusion of trans people from public places was – and remains – the end goal of the FWS litigation.

FWS were seeking change through the law – in this case, a judgment of the UK Supreme Court was the mechanism for change.

Photo credit: Pexels I Markus Spiske

And did they succeed? What does the ruling mean for trans and non-binary people?

So I’m not actually going to answer that here, because there are plenty of trans and non-binary people out there who have done an excellent job explaining that already.

If you want to learn more about the legal impact of the ruling, I recommend you follow the barrister Robin Moira White (she / her) who literally wrote the book “A Practical Guide to Transgender Law” and who has published clear and well-informed commentary in The Independent and The Guardian yesterday.

If you want to learn about the human impact of the ruling, I really loved this warm, reflective and passionate letter from Josie Giles on spending the day in the Pentlands, titled While the Supreme Court ruled, I tore up a fence.

And if you want to keep up to speed with what you can do to support the community most adversely impacted by this rule, I would recommend you follow the Scottish Trans project at the Equality Network for news and updates.

But the important thing is: the UK Supreme Court made it very clear that trans people are still protected against discrimination and harassment both on account of their trans identity, and also where they suffer discrimination and harassment because of the sex or gender they are perceived to be

So why does legal recognition of identity matter?

Well I have a great deal more to say about that, but I trust you have to get on with your day.

So I’ll make it snappy:

People have always identified themselves in lots of different ways: I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Chinese-American, but also maybe a Scot, I am a lawyer, I am a reader, I am a ramen-noodle-eater,… I am, I am, I am…

Some of those ways have legal consequence (like being a mother, or a lawyer) and some do not (like being a reader, or a ramen-noodle-eater). Some statuses, like “woman” or “Chinese” “American” and “Scot” have mixed legal and non-legal consequence.

Sometimes the state (and other people) label you with that consequence, whether or not you choose it. Here is an article I wrote last year about being legally required to declare my race on my marriage certificate.

Legal recognition of identity, and cases like FWS v Scottish Ministers is important because the real battleground is about whether and how the state recognises our identities, which identities are recognised and for what purpose, who decides, and who those decisions serve.

I am honestly at a loss as to who is actually served by this week’s Supreme Court decision.

But I do know what is at stake, and why we need to continue to watch this space very carefully in the years to come:

We all have a stake in ensuring that rights and protections for disadvantaged and excluded groups – including trans people but also all LGBT+ people, disabled people, racialised people, migrants, religious minorities, the elderly, children and women and so on – are maintained or extended, and not narrowed.

Because legal recognition has real life consequences. The law will protect or harm you based on those legal identities. Belonging (legal recognition) is safety. And in a more equal world, we all deserve to be safe.

That would have been a simpler test, one that the court did not – in seriousness – apply.

But we can judge – for we are not the UK Supreme Court – in future, whether what a party is seeking to achieve, in their campaigning, their strategy, their tactics and ultimately their goals – seeks to increase or decrease safety for others.

And particularly, where someone seeks to use the law to harm others, we can call that out, for what it is. That is the least we can do. And what I hope we all continue to have the strength to do, for today, for tomorrow, and for always.

…

Thanks for reading The Long View again this week and my apologies for giving you a bit more down than up this week.

To make that up to you, I’m digging deep: this is my very favourite song when I was a child, I used to listen to it on my cassette tape, over and over. And I sang it to my children, relentlessly when they were young too: Kermit the Frog – The Rainbow Connection

First published on LinkedIn on 18 April 2025:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/safety-belonging-why-legal-recognition-identity-matters-jen-ang-f9qce