Human Rights

Iain Morley QC worked for four years at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania prosecuting four cases of genocide in Rwanda. He reports on the work performed by the tribunal.  

Between April and July 1994, in 100 days, at an average rate of 10,000 souls per day, almost one million minority defenceless civilian Tutsi men women and children were systematically butchered by the Hutu majority throughout Rwanda, mostly with machetes, knives, spears, and cudgels, sometimes with grenades and firearms, sometimes by the army and police, but mostly by fearsome civilian militias often called the Interahamwe. There is evidence very many of the several hundred thousand women were raped before being murdered. The pretext for the carnage was the assassination of the Hutu President Juvenal Habyrimana on 6 April 1994, against a background of ethnic troubles over generations, smoldering particularly after the advent of independence from Belgium in 1959. 

THE Bar Council, the Law Society, the Criminal Bar Association, the Commonwealth Lawyers’ Association and the Bar Human Rights Committee have called on the Attorney General of the United States of America to take urgent action in cases where those detained in Guantánamo Bay were captured as juveniles. These concerns are set out in a letter sent to the US Attorney General, Eric Holder. 

Commenting on the continued detention of Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, Chairman of the Bar Desmond Browne QC said: 

‘The lengthy detention, and putting on trial for war crimes, of someone who appears to be a “child soldier” is contrary to the special protection to which Khadr and Jawad are entitled by virtue of the Optional Protocol, which provides for the rehabilitation and social reintegration of former child soldiers. We hope that the new administration will take this opportunity to reconsider the detention of those held in Guantánamo who were captured as juveniles.’ 

SENIOR representatives of the Bar Council and the Law Society attended a reception in Temple Church which marks the opening of an exhibition commemorating the suffering endured by Jewish lawyers under the Third Reich. Mounted by the German Federal Bar (BRAK), the Jewish Museum London, and Temple Church, the exhibition reveals the persecution of lawyers by the Nazi regime in the run-up to the Second World War, which led, in 1938, to a ban which prevented Jewish lawyers from practising in Germany. 

The exhibition sets out the lives and fates of some of the lawyers who suffered at the hands of the Nazi regime. Out of 19, 276 lawyers in Germany, many were Jewish or considered to be Jewish by the German Government. Of these, huge numbers became victims of the holocaust. The majority of those who managed to escape persecution sought refuge abroad; among those who fled to Britain were Otto Kahn-Freund, Michael Kerr and Gunter Treitel, all of whom were later knighted in recognition of their services to the law. 

“Six million is a big number”, Lord Justice Stanley Burnton told the group assembled in Temple Church on May 12 for the opening of “Lawyers without rights:  Jewish lawyers in Germany under the Third Reich”, but the impact of this exhibition is to help us to remember that it represented a lot of individuals.  

Khadija Ali and Lynne Townley explain the background to the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007 and consider what all sectors are doing to tackle the problem.  

Since the murder of Heshu Yones in 2002, the issue of forced marriage and other forms of honour based violence have been the source of media attention and more significantly that of the Government which brought the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007 into effect on 25 November 2008. 

Jodie Blackstock explores the issues raised by the European Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia and argues that tangible curtailments to freedom of speech could follow 

Sir Mark Potter, the President of the Family Division, and Mr Justice Munby, have joined Muslim groups in condemning forced marriages as unacceptable.

The Chairmen of the Bar Council of England and Wales and of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales have expressed their deep concern over the recent murders of Oscar Kamau Kingara, director of the Kenyan based Oscar Legal Aid Foundation, and its programme coordinator, John Paul Oulu. Both men were shot dead at close range in Nairobi traffic. The Oscar Foundation had campaigned against extra-judicial killings by police and “enforced disappearances”.

 Lord Hoffmann has criticised the European Court of Human Rights for behaving like the US Supreme Court on human rights issues. 

THE Chairmen of the Bar Council of England and Wales and of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales expressed their deep concern in a press release on 13 March 2009 at reports of the arrest and detention of magistrate Livingstone Chipadze in Mutare, Zimbabwe. The press release raised the following concerns, although the situation may have changed since. 

Mr Chipadze was reported to be accused of criminal abuse of office, apparently on the basis that on Tuesday 3 March he allowed lawyers for Roy Bennett MP to post bail of $2,000. Mr Bennett is the MDC’s nominee for agriculture minister in the Zimbabwean Unity Government. However, he has not been sworn in to that post, having been detained on terrorism charges in February.