Tell us a bit about your education background. Where and what did you study, and why?
I studied law in New Zealand at the University of Canterbury, which is in Christchurch. I did my LL.B as part of a double degree, together with a BA in literature and history. At the end of my double degree, I went to Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada to do an LL.M. I was interested in human rights and jurisprudence and in particular in the comparison between the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. When I was an undergraduate at Canterbury, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act had just been passed, and the Canadian Charter had been a major influence on it. So I ended up doing my LL.M. thesis on a comparison between the two. At the end of my thesis, though, I felt that what I had written was quite superficial, that there wasn’t enough space to get into the issues in the way that I wanted, so I applied to do my doctorate here in the UK.

So, I went to Oxford to do my D.Phil in the Law Faculty. With a doctoral thesis, though, things like word limits seem much less important than the substance of the ideas. Indeed, you find that a lot of the more jurisprudential theses are relatively short – it’s the argument that counts, not the length.

What did your thesis focus on?
My thesis was on minority cultural rights. It was a jurisprudential thesis, though, rather than a black-letter law one. Philosophically, I was very interested in the tension between the idea of human rights as universal rights and the idea of minority cultural rights, which are typically concerned with the interests of particular groups.

Because this was jurisprudence, I wasn’t looking at particular laws or cases so much as theories of rights, how do rights work, how do rights protect moral interests, and so on. But, it was at the same time I was covering a lot of human rights cases, and teaching as well. I thought it was an interesting area, particularly at the time when I had started my research, because there had been such a rise in ethnic nationalism during the 1990s. I finished being a full time student in residence in 1998, but I continued to write part time.

I then went to Bar School in London, and did the Bar Vocational Course. Then I worked as a research assistant at the Law Commission, in the criminal law team, working on double jeopardy, and prosecution appeals. While I was doing all that, I continued writing up my doctoral thesis, which I submitted in 2000, just before I started my pupillage.

So why did you decide to follow the path of a practitioner, as opposed to the one of an academic?
I had always meant to practice at some point, so I felt it was probably time to do the BVC. Moreoever, although jurisprudence is fascinating intellectually, you sometimes feel removed from practical issues. And I had always been interested in human rights: when I was an undergraduate law student in New Zealand, for instance, I did quite a bit of work with the local community law centre. And before my LL.M. in Canada, I interned with two human rights organisations in Montreal. The first was Equitas, which focused on education and training human rights workers from around the world, and the second was Rights and Democracy, which focused on project development and capacity-building, by funding grassroots human rights organisations in places like Nepal or the Philippines.

That’s very close to what Mercy Corps is doing now, in the United States. So, you had an interest in human rights from early on?
Yes, I had always been interested in human rights, and even before my doctorate, when I first came to the UK, I had tried to do internships in London but it was simply too expensive.

Yes! London is still expensive!
Yes, it’s still expensive, and it’s worth noting that the Human Rights Lawyers’ Association is now running a bursary scheme to help students doing unpaid internships with human rights organisations. Obviously, they can’t give money to everyone who applies, but they have been making awards to a number of candidates so far. And I think that’s very important because London is such an expensive place to be an intern.

We take interns every summer, for instance, and unfortunately we are not able to pay our interns but we are able to pay travel expenses, but we recognise that it’s very difficult for people who are keen to work in human rights to gain direct experience in organisations without considerable sacrifice on their own part.

So, why did you decide to qualify as a barrister instead of becoming an academic?
After doing my doctorate, I could have stayed in academia full time, but I decided that I was more interested in qualifying as a barrister in London and gaining professional experience, particularly because the law is not just about ideas, it’s also about how those operate in practice. So, I did my pupillage at 39 Essex Street, one of the big public law sets. A lot of my pupil masters were Treasury Counsel who were doing cases for the government, so I got to see a lot of public law from the government side.

I did an internship with Treasury Solicitors this summer and it’s very interesting to see arguments like public policy, and immigration control, being constantly repeated before the courts.
Yes, actually after my pupillage, I took a temporary contract with the Treasury Solicitors Department and spent a year working in the Immigration Judicial Review team. At the time, it was a group of around 20 lawyers with a very large number of immigration cases, as you will have seen. In one sense, you are doing the devil’s work, but in another sense, it’s excellent public law experience. Due to the high turnover of staff, I ended up being the lead lawyer for the National Asylum Support Service (‘NASS’), that was my particular responsibility within the team. I did general immigration judicial reviews as well, but I was in charge of doing all the judicial reviews on behalf of NASS.

Interestingly, this was all before Section 55 of the National Immigration Asylum Act 2002 came into force. I left to join JUSTICE at the beginning of 2003 and in the same month section 55 came into force and one of the first things I did was intervene in the judicial review against the government challenging the policy. Fortunately for me, I hadn’t handled any section 55 cases for NASS, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to be involved in the case. Nonetheless, I think it was a very valuable experience seeing how government policy works from the inside. It’s particularly helpful as a lawyer, to have that balance between claimants’ work and respondents’ work, and between government and individuals.

Yes, I agree. So what is your responsibility within JUSTICE?
I’m the director of Human Rights Policy at JUSTICE. So, I spend a lot of time preparing briefings on legislation, briefing members of Parliament, briefing peers in the House of Lords. We also respond to a lot of draft legislation, Green Papers and White Papers, proposals that are put forward by various government departments, and also other public bodies.

What sort of response? Whether it’s human rights compatible legislation?
Yes, we’re a human rights and law reform organisation so our focus is whether the law is compatible with fundamental rights and also whether its likely to be good law. Our focus is more legal than, say, Liberty, which is an organisation whose membership drawn from across the general public. JUSTICE’s members are all lawyers - barristers and solicitors, legal academics, judges and law students. So we aim to provide a legal and policy analysis – not just compatibility with the European Convention, but also other international instruments like the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights, and Economic, Social and Cultural rights, and the Torture convention.

What’s JUSTICE’s position on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Convention?
We have long argued that much more attention needs to be paid to economic social and cultural rights, as well as civil and political rights. And the section 55 issue is a very good example of that. Here you have asylum seekers who are prohibited from working in the UK but were also denied access to any kind of subsistence support or housing. The judicial review was focused upon whether this kind of government-enforced destitution amounted to inhuman treatment contrary to Article 3. And of course that’s a very important question to ask. But it’s also, in some ways, a distortion of the idea of human rights to have to argue that that policy is only wrong because it amounts to something like torture. Because the section 55 policy is also about the right to work, the right to housing, the right to subsistence, and so on.

Did you intervene in the Limbuela case?
Yes. When you’re doing a third party intervention, though, you don’t get very far in court referring to the Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights because unfortunately there’s very little the courts can do with something that’s not incorporated into UK law, like the ECHR is. So you focus on the most powerful argument you can make in legal terms. As a policy organisation, however, we also make the policy arguments about economic and social rights with government departments, in particular the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

So, do you campaign for the incorporation of the covenant?
Yes. We submitted evidence, for example, to the Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry on the issue back in 2003. We’ve also been working with other organisations, such as Amnesty International and the British Institute of Human Rights, about the link between human rights and poverty. The example of the South African Constitution is particularly important, a common law country that gives a degree of constitutional protection to economic and social rights as well as civil and political rights.

What other areas of law are you working on in JUSTICE?
We work across a wide range of areas. For example, immigration is one area of the law we’ve been doing a lot of work on recently. For instance, we’re giving oral evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on the draft Immigration and Citizenship Bill at the end of October. This is a major piece of legislation that aims to wrap up all the recent legislation from the past several years and consolidate them into one big Act. Consolidation is actually a good idea in principle, because the current law is such a mess, but the draft Bill isn’t just about consolidating the bad ideas of the past but introduces several new bad ideas of its own. For example, the idea of probationary citizenship and replacing the old concept of right of abode with the new scheme of citizens versus non-citizens. Or replacing deportation and removal with a single scheme of exclusion orders, putting people who have breached their immigration permission in a trivial way – say, failure to notify a change of address – on par with people who have been convicted of serious criminal offences. So these are the kinds of issues we are looking at, and that’s just one Bill that we’re working on, in one area among many. We’re working on immigration, we work on criminal justice, privacy rights, discrimination and equality, EU law and so on.

And what are your new projects with the UCL Human Rights Programme?
I’m doing a workshop with the UCL Human Rights Programme on 11 November about third party interventions, what’s involved and how they’re different from representing individual claimants. In addition to the workshop, where we have particular research needs as part of an intervention in a future case, we’re hoping to get people from the Human Rights Programme to help us with the research. It’s very difficult to predict when research requests will come up, or how often, because every case is different, and not every case requires the same kind of research, or the same level of research that’s appropriate for full-time students to take on. But we’re optimistic that there will be at least one case, so we can ask UCL students to help us out.

Are you looking for LLM students?
LLM Students and undergraduates as well, if they feel that they are able to assist. Again, it’s impossible to predict what our research needs will be for a particular case, but where there is a suitable case that we can identify, then we hope to ask the Human Rights Programme to help us. We’ve already done this in a couple of cases, for instance, we worked with Oxford students to do comparative research on our intercept evidence report, back in 2006.

Do you have any major projects going on at the moment? Do you have any events coming up?
Well tomorrow (21st October) we have our 10th annual Human Rights Law Conference. We first started doing it the year that the Human Rights Act was passed and now it’s grown to one of the largest legal conferences of the year, with somewhere in the region of 250 lawyers attending. The keynote speech will be given by Lady Justice Arden of the Court of Appeal, followed by Nathalie Lieven QC who will give a review of the major human rights cases of the last 12 months. Then we’ll have a series of breakout sessions with lots of different topics including criminal justice, counter terrorism, deaths in custody, with a number of human rights lawyers, people like Raza Husain, and Monica Carss-Frisk for example, will be speaking at the breakout sessions. And then in the afternoon, at the end of the day, Jack Straw will come along and give a speech on 10 years of the Human Rights Act.

Can students also attend or is it just for lawyers?
It’s open to everyone but we run it jointly with Sweet & Maxwell on a commercial basis so unfortunately I expect students would find it very expensive to attend. It’s really aimed at people who are in full time practice, who need to know more about the relevant law because of the work that they do and also for their continuing professional development. We’re conscious that it’s very expensive for non-practitioners to attend, so we also run seminars and conferences aimed at students as part of the JUSTICE Student Human Rights Network.

Could you tell us a bit more about the Justice Student Human Rights Network?
Yes, we have an event coming up on the 15th of November at BPP Law School in Holborn, where myself, our director Roger Smith, and Shaheen Rahman, a human rights barrister, will be giving a morning seminar focusing on human rights in the UK. We’re also looking at doing, just as we did with Freshfields earlier this year, another big student human rights conference early in 2009.

So do you take volunteers to help you with that?
We don’t have volunteers, unfortunately, but we do have both a summer and a winter internship programme. We’ve always taken interns in the summer, but recently we noticed that we get a certain number of applications year round as well. Ideally, we’d like to take a lot more interns as we always find that we receive lots of applications from excellent candidates. Sadly, we have very limited resources so the numbers we’re able to take are quite small.

So what are the dates for the winter internship? 
We have three vacancies this winter, one with a slightly earlier deadline than the others. Our director, Roger Smith, needs an intern to help him with work on the Constitutional Reform Bill and the deadline for that is 1st November. The other two vacancies are in criminal justice and human rights respectively, and there the deadline is 21st November. Details of the internships and how to apply are on JUSTICE’s website.

Let’s move to another question, since we are talking about students and human rights and internships, what advice would you give for students who would like to enter this field?
The most important thing to bear in mind is that there isn’t any clear established career path to working as a lawyer in a human rights organisation and that there are very few positions in any event and even fewer vacancies. So virtually all the lawyers I know who work for human rights NGOs have come to the field with experience in some other field, everything from working as a criminal law attorney in the US to academia to government to doing a training contract in a City firm. The common elements are showing a commitment to human rights above and beyond whatever your daily work may be. And I think the best way of demonstrating this interest is through voluntary work, including internships. I know this isn’t the most helpful advice because even our own organisation isn’t equipped to take more than a handful of interns a year, but there are a lot of organisations out there, from law centres to asylum groups that can use the help. To a certain extent, it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time, which isn’t something that you can plan for unfortunately. But, it’s very important to keep up the interest. Students sometimes worry about specialising in the right area of law but I think it’s better to focus on the areas of law that interest you most, whether it’s public law, criminal law, commercial law or whatever – because, in the long run, the kind of law you specialise in is often less important than the broader commitment you have to human rights.