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